Music Quotes

He was able to sit in silence for long stretches without feeling a need to make small talk.

Charles R. Cross

Broken pencils still write beautiful songs.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Writing is my oxygen. Music is my carbon dioxide.

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.

I’m a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.

Nicholas Trandahl

Light quirks of music broken and uneven Make the soul dance upon a jig to Heav'n.

The man that hath no music in himself Nor is no moved with concord of sweet sounds Is fit for treasons stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

Benjamin Britten

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.

William Congreve

Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

Anonymous

She was an aging singer who had to take every note above 'A' with her eyebrows.

Going to the opera like getting drunk is a sin that carries its own punishment with it and that a very severe one.

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

I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

If a literary man puts together two words about music one of them will be wrong.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.

Igor Stravinsky

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Beethoven

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

William Congreve

Soprano basso even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto.

Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

The musician who always plays on the same string is laughed at.

Horace

Music is the universal language of mankind.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All of heaven we have below.

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Bill Nye

For most singers the first half of the career involves extending one's repertoire the second half trimming it.

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Gioacchino Rossini

Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Music is only sound expressing certain patterns so to what extent is that sound architecture and to what extent theatre?

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

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Music is your own experience your thoughts your wisdom. If you don't live it it won't come out of your horn.

The good composer is slowly discovered the bad composer is slowly found out.

The function of pop music is to be consumed.

Oboe - an ill woodwind that nobody blows good.

Anonymous

Music first and last should sound well should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.

I am tired before the concert not afterward.

Artur Rubinstein

Music the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have below.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

Igor Stravinsky

Had I learned to fiddle I should have done nothing else.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah that is where the art resides!

Chamber music - a conversation between friends.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Mozart is the human incarnation of the divine force of creation.

Goethe

I write as a sow piddles.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

Igor Stravinsky

Throughout my career nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at I feel as bad as I did the very first time.

Twelve Highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.

Scottish Proverb

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

Gioacchino Rossini

Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!

You know what you do when you shit singing is the same thing only up!

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

When people hear good music it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.

Edgar Watson Howe

Light quirks of music broken and uneven make the soul dance upon a jig of heaven.

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

Robert Browning

Richard Wagner a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.

Gioacchino Rossini

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