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.
Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”
Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
I should get a weekend show where all I do is play country music.
Q: Everyone picks up a certain emotional vulnerability in your music.
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
“His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”
The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.
If you've lost your faith in love and music, oh, the end won't be long.