Music Quotes and Proverbs

Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer, From Chaos to Coherence
As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.

Doc Childre and Howard Martin, HeartMath Solution
At that elusive moment when we transcend our ordinary performance and feel in harmony with something else—whether it's a glorious sunset, inspiring music or another human being—our studies have shown that what we are really coming in sync with is ourselves. Not only do we feel more relaxed and at peace, but this entrained state increases our ability to perform well and offers numerous health benefits.

Albert Einstein
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.

Katie Greenwood
Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, You learn notes to play to the music of your soul.

Anon
A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.

Joseph Addison
Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

Jacques Attali
Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham
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.

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

Benjamin Britten
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.

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

Mariah Carey
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.

Thomas Carlyle
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.

Mary Chapin Carpenter
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.

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

Noel Coward
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

George Eliot (1819-80), [Mary Ann Evans] British writer
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Aretha Franklin, [Queen of Soul] Motown singer, performer
I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

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

Harlan Howard
Country music is three chords and the truth.

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

Billy Joel
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.

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

Geoffrey Latham
Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Hal A. Lingerman
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.

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

Thomas Mann
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.

Pietro Mascagni
Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Henry Miller
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Theodore Mungers
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Ernest Newman
A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) - Famous Writer
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Charlie Parker
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Zimbabwe Proverb
If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Bonnie Raitt
I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Simon Rattle
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Kevin Richardson
It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got "Backstreet." We put "Boys" on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Robbie Robertson
Music should never be harmless.

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini
Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Johann G. Seume
Music is the key to the female heart.

William Shakespeare
Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

John Philip Sousa
Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

George Steiner
The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Igor Stravinsky
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

George Szell
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Jeffrey Tate
The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Frank Zappa
Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best.

James Taylor
I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Paul Whiteman
Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Oscar Wilde
Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Ron Wood
There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Yoko Ono
All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Frank Zappa
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719), English essayist, poet, statesman
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron] English romantic poet
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Truman Capote (1924-84), American novelist, short-story writer, Breakfast at Tiffany's
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

Truman Capote (1924-84), American novelist, short-story writer, Breakfast at Tiffany's
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Jim Davis (b. 1945), cartoonist
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.

Agnes de Mile (1905-93)
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and music.

Maurice Druon, From the Memoirs of Zeus
Number is the Word but is not utterance; it is wave and light, though no one sees it; it is rhythm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each form of life is a particular reverberation of Number.

Gerald Early, writer, baseball documentary
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.

Eric Anderson
It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit—enable them to see visions and dream dreams.

June Masters Bacher
Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), American clergyman
Of all the music that reached farthest into heaven, it is the beating of a loving heart.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), American clergyman
Of all the earthly music, that which reaches farthest into heaven is the beating of a truly loving heart.

Warren G. Bennis (b. 1925), American writer, educator, University of Southern California sociologist
Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.

Phillips Brooks (1835-93), American Episcopal bishop, wrote O' Little Town of Bethlehem
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.

Samuel Butler (1612-80), English poet, author
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Samuel Butler (1612-80), English poet, author
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.

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

Placido Domingo
The high note is not the only thing.

Lawrence Durrell
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Antonin Dvorak
Mozart is sweet sunshine.

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

Liam Gallagher
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.

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

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

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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.

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

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

Steven Halpern
When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Sir John Herschel
Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Albert Einstein (1875-1955), German-born American theoretical physicist, theories of relativity, philosopher
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.