Music Quotes

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

W. H. Auden

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

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Allan Bloom

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

Benjamin Britten

Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.

Robert Browning

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

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

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

[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

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

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

Jazz may be thought of as a current that bubbled forth from a spring in the slums of New Orleans to become the main spring of the twentieth century.

Henry Pleasants

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

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

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

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Van Morrison