Quotes On Music and Musicians

Mankind's Wisdom on Music
from
Mozart to McCartney
Quotes on Music
and Musicians
Quotes on Music and Musicians
Mankinds Wisdom on Music
from Mozart to McCartney
Compiled by Patty Crowe
Edited by Jonathan Crowe
Richer Resources Publications
Arlington, Virginia
Copyright 2008
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book or the artwork it contains
may be reproduced in any form except for the
inclusion of brief quotations in review
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from the publisher.
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ISBN 978-0-9818162-5-8
Printed in the United States of America
For Musicians and their Music
Music gives a soul to the universe,
wings to the mind, flight to the imagination,
and life to everything.
Plato
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts
successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight
this is! All this inventing, this producing,
takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption,
a distraction, in the life of a nation,
is close to the center of a nation's purpose-
and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization.
John F. Kennedy
The most perfect expression of
human behavior is a string quartet.
Jeffrey Tate
Music happens to be an art form
that transcends language.
Herbie Hancock
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Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
Robert Fripp
Music takes up where language leaves off.
Charlie Bird
Music is your own experience, your thoughts,
your wisdom. If you don't live it,
it won't come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker
You are unique, be yourself, put out
that thing that is you, then use your work ethic
and produce great music.
Kenny Burrell
Music speaks what cannot be expressed,
soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart
and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul.
Unknown
Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it,
and lifts it into a realm which it would not
reach if it were left to itself.
Henry Ward Beecher
Ah music.... a magic far beyond anything done here.
Joanne Kathleen Rowling
Silence is the fabric upon which
the notes are woven.
Lawrence Duncan
Music is the harmonious voice of creation;
an echo of the invisible world.
Giuseppe Mazzini
Music is nothing else but wild sounds
civilized into time and tune.
Thomas Fuller
All the sounds on the earth are like music.
Oscar Hammerstein
The earth has music for those who listen.
William Shakespeare
Most of us go to our graves with
our music still inside of us.
Unknown This is copyrighted material. You are welcome to preview this book online.
Music is the vernacular of the human soul.
Geoffrey Latham
Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen
Music is the poetry of the air.
Richter
Music produces a kind of pleasure which
human nature cannot do without.
Confucius
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
Music is given to us with the sole purpose
of establishing an order in things, including,
and particularly, the coordination
between man and time.
Igor Stravinsky
Music expresses that which cannot be said and
on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo
Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room
and come out with a piece of music.
Paul McCartney
There's nothing remarkable about it.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the
right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wes Montgomery played impossible things
on the guitar because it was never pointed out
to him that they were impossible.
Ronnie Scott
Nothing has the strength, the power of music.
Sam Phillips
Music is the literature of the heart;
it commences where speech ends.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us
dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are,
and for what, whence, and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful,
poetic things to the heart.
Pablo Casals
There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.
Robert Browning
Music may achieve the highest of all missions:
She may be a bond between nations, races
and states, who are strangers
to one another in many ways;
She may unite what is disunited,
and bring peace to what is hostile.
Dr. Max Bendiner
Music is a universal language... something
everybody can unite over and enjoy together.
Paul McCartney
There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
Lord Byron
Music, once admitted to the soul,
becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
Robert Browning
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom
and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which
the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Music is like the ocean, and the instruments
are little or bigger islands, very beautiful
for the flowers and trees.
Andres Segovia
Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener
to venture just a little out of the sense
of his own subjectivity.
Karl Barth
The Theory of Relativity...
occurred to me by intuition, and music
was the driving force behind that intuition.
My discovery was the result of
musical perception.
Albert Einstein
Music, when soft voices die,
vibrates in the memory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Bach opens a vista to the universe.
After experiencing him, people feel
there is meaning to life after all.
Helmut Walcha
A phenomenon like Mozart remains
an inexplicable thing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... music is an immediate art;
it's always happening right now ...
Sam Andrew
Music is love in search of a word.
Sidney Lanier
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
William Congreve
If a composer could say what he had to say in words
he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
There is nothing in the world so much
like prayer as music is.
William P. Merrill
If music be the food of love, play on:
give me excess of it...
William Shakespeare
Music and rhythm find their way into
the secret places of the soul.
Plato
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few
seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul
what the water bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Its language is a language which the soul
alone understands, but which the soul
can never translate.
Arnold Bennett
Mozart is sweet sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak
Music is the art of the prophets,
the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul;
it is one of the most magnificent and delightful
presents god has given us.
Martin Luther
You are the music while the music lasts.
T. S. Eliot
I've come up with the theory that the music
is within. We don't bring it in; it's already there
We have to figure out how to get it out.
Howard Roberts
Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear,
feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
Samuel Butler
Music is what feelings sound like.
Anon
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture.
The air in the performance
is sculpted into something.
Frank Zappa
Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
Jean Paul Richter
Music is the wine which inspires one to new
generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses
out this glorious wine for mankind
and makes them spiritually drunken.
Ludwig van Beethoven
... everyone was using tiny brushes and doing
watercolors, while Jimi Hendrix was painting
galactic scenes in Cinemascope. We are working
in a field of mystical resonance, sound and
vibration... that's what makes people cry,
laugh and feel their hair stand up...
Carlos Santana
Music is a beautiful opiate,
if you don't take it too seriously.
Henry Miller
Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars
you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas
and listen to them for ten years.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
A painter paints pictures on canvas.
But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be
very silent if no birds sang except the best.
Henry Van Dyke
Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
and all of heaven we have below.
Joseph Addison
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
Eric Anderson
...surrender your whole being into a note, and
gravity disappears ... with one chord, John Lee
Hooker could tell you a story as deep as the ocean...
Carlos Santana
If you can walk you can dance.
If you can talk you can sing.
Zimbabwe Proverb
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its
frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
Play everyday and take it in front of other people.
They need to hear it and you need them to hear it.
James Taylor
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
Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of
my future... I want to lead an orchestra
with excellent musicians. I want to play music
which draws pictures of the world and its space.
Jimi Hendrix
Music isn't just learning notes and playing them,
You learn notes to play to the music of your soul.
Katie Greenwood
The music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty
that one feels he merely found it that it has
always existed as part of the inner beauty of the
universe waiting to be revealed.
Albert Einstein
It is cruel, you know, that music should be
so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness 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
Music is the art which is most nigh
to tears and memory.
Oscar Wilde
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy
Without music, life would be an error.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams
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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
Music is the movement of sound to reach
the soul for the education of its virtue.
Plato
Sounds like the blues are composed of
feeling, finesse, and fear.
Billy Gibbons
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
Bach gave us God's Word.
Mozart gave us God's laughter.
Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us
Music that we might pray without words.
Quote from outside an old opera house
Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules get
too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion.
Slash of Guns 'n Roses
My idea is that there is music in the air,
music all around us; the world is full of it,
and you simply take as much as you require.
Edward Elgar
The glory of music endures
in the depths of the human soul.
Henry Van Dyke
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
The history of a people is found in its songs.
George Jellinek
Music is the language of the spirit.
It opens the secret of life
bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
Among all men on the earth bards
have a share of honor and reverence,
because the muse has taught them songs
and loves the race of bards.
Homer
The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and music.
Agnes de Mile
He who sings scares away his woes.
Cervantes
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
Pat Conroy
Jazz will endure just as long people hear it
through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses
harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green
The pause is as important as the note.
Truman Fisher
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
After silence that which comes nearest to
expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Jules Combarieu
Play the music, not the instrument.
Author Unknown
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear
and grief, that does not find relief in music.
George Eliot
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.
Theodore Mungers
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Quotes on Music and Musicians
Mankind's Wisdom on Music
from Mozart to McCartney
Music, which some call the universal language, has been
with us as long as life itself. From each continent's birdsong
to the thumping of elephants on their moonlit jaunt across a
grassland, from the Neanderthal's bone flutes and triangles
to Mozart's orchestral harmonies to today's electronically
generated sounds, music has been created, advanced and
enjoyed by every living creature in history.
Acoustic, electrified, natural or man-made, sounds which
speak to us, which harmonize and touch the soul, are perhaps
the truest and most spiritual form of communication ever
devised by life forms. Indeed, among many life forms,
they are the essence of communication itself.
Jean Paul Richter reminds us that, "Music is the poetry of
the air." Add to that the admonition of British composer
Edgar Elgar that, "there is music in the air, music all
around us...simply take as much as you require,"
and it is certain we can never be the poorer for living
in this world if we only take a moment to listen.
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