Quotes and aphorisms on music | The World of English

Quotes and aphorisms on music, a collection of the best quotes on music by famous authors, artists and musicians to better understand the eternal magic of music.

Ezra Pound informs us that perhaps music is the bridge between the conscious and the unthinking, sentient, and even insentient universe. It’s essentially the bridge between our imbecility and that of the universe, which is why certain singers are so successful.
Carl William Brown

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.
Joseph Addison

I didn’t have nothin’ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.
Eminem

The music transports me into a world where the pain does not cease to exist, but widens, subsides, becomes both calmer and deeper, like a stream that turns into a lake.

Marguerite Yourcenar.

Music inflames temperament.
Jim Morrison

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

Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen

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

Perhaps music is so successful because it has no meaning; it is merely a splendid and disappointing signifier.
Carl William Brown

There is two kinds of music; the good and bad. I play the good kind.
Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong

Music helps not to hear inside the silence that is outside.
Johann Sebastian Bach

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

Literature, like music, is certainly a drug, but it improves brain activity. In some cases, that is.
Carl William Brown

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.
Lauren Bacall

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.
Sir Thomas Beecham

September 1998. Lucio Battisti dies, a great poet who, through his songs, even managed to give a certain dignity to banality. He was a musical beacon for many generations, and even Carl William Brown paid him a great tribute in the distant 1980s by purchasing a compilation of Battisti’s greatest hits, made in Naples, from a Moroccan in a bar in Brescia.
Carl William Brown

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
Sir Thomas Beecham

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Sir Thomas Beecham

This is nothing more than a pilgrim’s journey to the sanctuary of stupidity. He’s not in good company, so he listens to the advice of the wise men of the past and some rebellious, melancholy music.
Carl William Brown

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

She was one of those people who said “I don’t know anything about music, but I know what I like.”
Max Beerbohm

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
Ludwig Van Beethoven

Unfortunately, in middle school I had such a terrible teacher that in three years he couldn’t even teach us musical notation.
Carl William Brown

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.
Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I’d try a revolver first.
Josh Billings

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Music can be a sort of therapy, but we live on earth and till we are here there is not a definitive, complete and satisfactory treatment.
Carl William Brown

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.
John Christian Bovee

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

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him – if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.
Peter Stephen Paul Brook

A friend of mine, when he heard I was writing a book about stupidity, said to me, “You know, to increase your productivity, you should listen to music.” I asked him what kind of music, and smiling he confidently replied, “A little bit of everything is more than fine.”
Carl William Brown

I’m not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can’t play my stuff. It’s too complicated.
James Brown

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

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

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
Samuel Butler

As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn’t dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn’t have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive — and it still informs other kinds of music.
David Byrne

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of “culture.”
John Cage

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus

Sound is the counterpart of silence, we need both of them, at least till we live.
Carl William 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

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.
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.
Thomas Carlyle

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.
Thomas Carlyle

Song is the heroics of speech.
Thomas Carlyle

For most people, love is nothing more than a mild and sometimes dangerous existential anesthetic, just like football, drugs, entertainment, art, and music.
Carl William Brown

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

Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.
Miguel De Cervantes

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. Cioran

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Jean Cocteau

Music has charms to soothe the savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
William Congreve

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

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
Bill Cosby

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Noel Coward

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
Miles Davis

Good music is very close to primitive language.
Denis Diderot

Composers shouldn’t think too much – it interferes with their plagiarism.
Howard Dietz

The high note is not the only thing.
Placido Domingo

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
James Duffecy

Linkin Park – Faint – Drum Cover by Kristina Rybalchenko

Always playing metal she became very magnetic, that’s why I’d better demagnetize myself.
Carl William Brown

Music is only love looking for words.
Lawrence Durrell

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Lawrence Durrell

Mozart is sweet sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
Havelock Ellis

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine

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

The music of life is in danger of being lost in the music of the voice.
Mahatma Gandhi

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings.
Edward Gardner

The composer Luciano Berio said that in Italy, music is managed by incompetents. Of course, while he was at it, he could have also offered a word of comfort for literature, politics, entertainment, and so on.
Carl William Brown

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
Henry Giles

Now, to curry favor with the younger generations, the Pope has decided, among other things, to become the megaphone of rock stars and starlets, once the devil’s music. And so even the old rebel Bob Dylan will play for the pontiff, not for free, of course, but only for the modest sum of five hundred thousand euros.
Carl William Brown

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

I know only two tunes. One them is “Yankee Doodle” and the other isn’t.
Ulysses S. Grant

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

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.
H. R. Haweis

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable.
Hermann Hesse

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites – opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity – where energies flow smoothly in one direction – there will be much doing but no music.
Eric Hoffer

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

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

Country music is three chords and the truth.
Harlan Howard

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

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent
Victor Hugo

In Italy, Anglo-American music is very successful, perhaps also because its listeners don’t understand the lyrics, and not just the music.
Carl William Brown

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
James G. Huneker

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.
Michael Jackson

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 only sensual pleasure without vice.
Samuel Johnson

‘Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.
Ben Jonson

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.
Geoffrey Latham

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don’t know anything.
John Lennon

Oscar to Morricone. After all, the music is nothing more than the soundtrack to this absurd film whose main protagonist is our stupid planet!
Carl William Brown

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

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

The first enchanting music I ever heard was the melodious sound of my mother’s voice.
Carl William Brown

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
Martin Luther

By now, the Church has understood that contemporary music is the ideal medium to promote its nonsense and to reach an increasingly imbecilic and ignorant audience, thus bringing it closer to its unhealthy metaphysical lucubrations.
Carl William Brown

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
Martin Luther

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.
Martin Luther

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

A woman’s two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.
Loretta Lynn

And even a protest song that made history ends up becoming a carefree background music for a crowded, sunny beach filled with tourists who have no thought or concern for the global fate of humanity.
Carl William Brown

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.
Pietro Mascagni

I saw an elderly pianist living in a retirement home for musicians who naively stated: “Faith and music (and a little money, I might add) help me live peacefully!”
Carl William Brown

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H. L. Mencken

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

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
John Milton

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
Van Morrison

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

Rock ‘n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.
Richard Neville

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

Only sick music makes money today.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

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

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.
Richard M. Nixon

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
Bill Nye

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

Music, like literature, feeds on itself, and so it sometimes gets indigestion and vomits a load of bullshit.
Carl William Brown

Rock ‘n’ Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.
Vance Packard

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.
Charlie Parker

They say that classical music, by training the brain’s connections between neurons, develops mathematical abilities, but even much rap music has its positive aspects; for example, it develops imbecility.
Carl William Brown

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater

You don’t need any brains to listen to music.
Luciano Pavarotti

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.
Samuel Pepys

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Plato

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
Plato

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
Plutarch

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, “It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.”
Ezra Pound

I don’t know anything about music. In my line, you don’t have to.
Elvis Presley

When the music changes, so does the dance.
Nigerian Proverb

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

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

Music should never be harmless.
Robbie Robertson

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

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.
John Ruskin

Disturbed – Down with the Sickness – Drum Cover by Kristina Rybalchenko

Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.
Artur Schnabel

If we were all determined to play the first violin, we should never have an ensemble; therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.
Robert Schumann

Contemporary music has a great laxative effect. Well, at least it has a positive stimulus on you. That’s something.
Carl William Brown

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.
Robert Schumann

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

If music be the food of love; play on.
William Shakespeare

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

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.
William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
George Bernard Shaw

Music is the brandy of the damned.
George Bernard Shaw

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.
Baruch Benedict de Spinoza

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
Ringo Starr

They said, “You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, “Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.”
Wallace Stevens

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

A rather mediocre musical group, but naturally, given the times (we are towards the end of the 20th century AD), it was very successful.
Carl William Brown

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
Igor Stravinsky

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky

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

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

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

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.
Henry David Thoreau

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Count Leo Tolstoy

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.
Mark Twain

It is easier to understand a nation by listening to its music than by learning its language.
Author Unknown

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it by one’s conversation.
Oscar Wilde

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
Rebecca West

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

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
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.
Oscar Wilde

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Colin Wilson

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.
Arthur Winter

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.
Ron Wood

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.
William Wordsworth

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
Frank Zappa

The manner in which Americans “consume” music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie – it’s consumed that way without any regard for how and why it’s made.
Frank Zappa

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