Music Quotes

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Joseph Addison

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Conclusion, 1854

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

George Jean Nathan

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Georges Clemenceau

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and music.

Agnes de Mille

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

Roald Dahl

Making music should not be left to the professionals.

Michelle Shocked

There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.

The National, Paris, 1850

Silence is more musical than any song.

Christina Rossetti

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

Michel de Montaigne

There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.

Isaac Stern

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Aaron Copland

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartettes, chamber music, and cantatas.

S. J. Perelman

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DOE Unbearably lovely music is heard as the curtain rises, and we see the woods on a summer afternoon. A fawn dances on and nibbles slowly at some leaves. He drifts lazily through the soft foliage. Soon he starts coughing and drops dead.

Woody Allen, Without Feathers

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

Samuel Butle

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life without music would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

E. M. Cioran

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.

Agnes de Mille

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - The world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

Henry Mille

For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bovary

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

Edith Sitwell

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart it torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: Sing for us soon again; that is as much as to say. May new sufferings torment your soul.

Soren Kierkegaard

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten imparting grace.

Plato

Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.

Ben Harpe

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.

Gerald Early

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossile to be silent.

Victor Hugo

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

Pablo Casals

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Bob Marley

The earth has grown old with its burden of care But at Christmas it always is young, The heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair And its soul full of music breaks the air, When the song of angels is sung.

Phillips Brooks

Since it architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music.

Friedrich von Schelling

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

Jim Davis