Music Quotes

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

Claude Debussy

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

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

George Jean Nathan

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

Swearing is like any other music... If it is not done well, if it is not done with a fine and discriminating art, and vitalized with gracious and heartborn feeling, it lacks beauty, it lacks charm, it lacks expression, it lacks nobleness, it lacks majesty...

David Gridley, Indiantown

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

The music business was not safe, but it was FUN. It was like falling in love with a woman you know is bad for you, but you love every minute with her, anyway.

Lionel Richie

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Berthald Auerbach

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

Kahlil Gibran

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

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.

Jonathan Edwards

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Thomas Carlyle

I call architecture frozen music.

Goethe

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - - what are they They are the happiest people in the world.

William Lyon Phelps

Music is the harmonious voice of creation an echo of the invisible world.

Giuseppe Mazzini

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

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

From the persistence of noise comes the insistence of rage. From the emergence of tone comes the divergence of thought. From the enlightenment of music comes the wisdom of... silence.

Visions of Gregorian Chants

We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas

The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.

Dave Matthews, VH1 Special: Trey And Dave Go To Africa

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

Roald Dahl

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

Victor Hugo

Van Gogh became a painter because he had no ear for music.

Nikki Harris

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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

S. J. Perelman

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

I wish you music to help with the burdens of life, and to help you release your happiness to others.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Only sick music makes money today.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world.

Peter Ustinov

Aunt Marion was right... Never marry a musician, and never answer the door.

Charlie Brown, Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz