Skip to content

Music Quotes

Shakespeare has the most entries, as usual, with Claude Debussy and Wordsworth well up the list. The best-sourced line is Nietzsche’s in Twilight of the Idols (1889), that without music life would be a mistake, and Emerson’s image of the silent organ chanting loudest (Poems, 1847) is the sort of thing that rewards a second read.

The three entries with flags are all ones people like to share. “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” is credited to Mark Twain and flagged misattributed. “You grow with music, or the music outgrows you” is credited to John Lennon, and the note says no verifiable source has been found. The line about music being the best means we have of digesting time is credited to W. H. Auden and is flagged misattributed as well.

Random quote on Music

Most quoted on music:

In 1968 Life called the new rock music "the first music born in the age of instant communication." In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite.

Mark Kurlansky

In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it.

Saul Leiter Saul Leiter (2008)

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915)

“What else is she like?”
The Eshva sighed at the touch of Azhrarn’s fingers. The sigh said this: Like a white moth at dusk, a night-blooming lily. Like music played by the reflection of a swan as it passes over the strings of a moonlit lake.

Tanith Lee Night's Master (1978)

The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism. They are to consist of a lecture mainly, and, as a pleasing and grateful auxiliary, of music to elevate the heart and give rest to the feelings.

Felix Adler Founding Address (1876)

I’m nothing but a conduit. The music goes though my ears, my fingers... Composer is a god. Composer creates music. We’re performers. We’re just passing it on.

Valentina Lisitsa

Art was what I originally started out to do and music came second at first. I had a year at art college but I left because it was too much like school. I give all my paintings away to people I like.

Cat Stevens

These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

Wallace Stevens Harmonium (1923)

The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study' governs his combinations of them

Hermann Ebbinghaus

I would probably say that music is one of the most expressive art forms for me. Of course, I don’t perform professionally, though it does play a huge role: it helps me think differently and want to go on living.

Chulpan Khamatova

Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life…but I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future.

Gilberto Gil

All the experience that I get through my travels with music, I would like to share it with the youth, with school children and with older people, to give back what I have experienced in my lifetime.

Stella Chiweshe

Said at the age of two to the organist Friar Memmo

Mary I of England

She'll turn her music on you
You won't have to think twice
She's pure as New York snow
She's got Bette Davis eyes

Jackie DeShannon Bette Davis Eyes (1975)

The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)

Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

As quoted in Garnett, Vallée, Brandl, The Universal Anthology, Vol 12 (1809), p. 192.

Galen

Well, I like to think about what Louis Armstrong and also Duke Ellington said about music. There'are only two kinds of music: good and bad... And, I would like to think about my music as being good.

Dr. John

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Yeats The Tower (1928)

That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music.

Yasunari Kawabata The Master of Go (1951)

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

Odilon Redon

Related topics