Music Quotes

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


All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle


If the King loves music, it is well with the land.  ~Mencius


Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons.  You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.  ~Gustav Mahler


Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  ~Michael Torke


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 Day Is Done


He who sings scares away his woes.  ~Cervantes


Music was my refuge.  I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.  ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name


Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


Music is what feelings sound like.  ~Author Unknown


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


Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.  The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg:  I have it in my pocket.  ~Henri Rabaud


Music is the poetry of the air.  ~Richter


If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.  It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.  Sydney Smith


There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.  ~William P. Merrill


If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.  ~Henry David Thoreau


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


I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours.  But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places.  Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.  ~H.A. Overstreet


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


Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


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


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.


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


Play the music, not the instrument.  ~Author Unknown


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


Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.  ~Robert Fripp


[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger.  ~John Chesson


Music's the medicine of the mind.  ~John A. Logan


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


Music is the universal language of mankind.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer


Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.  Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.  ~Ezra Pound


He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.  ~Robert Browning


You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.  ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket


The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet.  ~Oliver Herford


What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way.  Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell.  ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra


Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo