Music Quotes

"In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain."
--George Szell

". . . I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone."
--Josephine Baker

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert."
--Pat Conroy

"The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music...Bodies never lie..."
--Agnes de Mille

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
--Sir Thomas Beecham

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
--James Brown

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
--Mariah Carey

"Where words fail, music speaks."
--Hans Christian Andersen

"It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."
--Ursula K. Le Guin

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
--Thomas Carlyle

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says "I want to do this song of yours" because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.
--Mary Chapin Carpenter

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
--Pat Conroy

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
--Noel Coward

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.
--Howard Dietz

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
--Ludwig Van Beethoven

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
--Benjamin Britten

The high note is not the only thing.
--Placido Domingo

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
--Lawrence Durrell

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.
--Aretha Franklin

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.
--Liam Gallagher

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
--George Gershwin

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
--Billy Gibbons

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Your talking to someone who really understands rock music.
--Tipper Gore

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
--Benny Green

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
--John Milton

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.
--Buddy Holly

If music be the food of love, play on: give me excess of it..
--William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs.
--George Bernard Shaw

Mozart is sweet sunshine.
--Antonin Dvorak

You are the music while the music lasts.
--T. S. Eliot

Country music is three chords and the truth.
--Harlan Howard

The history of a people is found in its songs.
--George Jellinek

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
--Billy Joel

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
--James Weldon Johnson

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.
--Geoffrey Latham

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.
--Hal A. Lingerman

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
--Witold Lutoslawski

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
--Thomas Mann