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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:

I always dreamed in my youth of a great, consuming love. I was often disappointed and returned each time to my music for consolation. It never failed me.

Pierre Monteux

The relation of the performance of music to sound is complex and ambiguous: this is what makes possible Mark Twain's joke that Wagner is better than he sounds.

Charles Rosen Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002)

Playing music is something I would like to do my whole life.

Ross Mintzer

I love people and people watching. I love music. I am intrigued by musicians more than I am actors. I have a bigger respect for them.

Maia Mitchell

No music was made from grief, moulded from sorrow.

Juhani Aho

Doing variety shows is to make money, and the ultimate goal of making money is to return to making music.

Joker Xue

I never thought of my music as dark…It can’t be that dark to get people through a dark period, can it?

Tricky

She is one of the great pillars of traditional Rwandan music…

Diana Teta

You will be hurt a lot, but use music to heal your internal wounds.

Abiodun Koya

Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find it was emptiness that made the music.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon Aurora Floyd (1863)

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.

Jack Handey

The ascetic Gotama … avoids watching dancing, singing, music and shows.

Gautama Buddha

Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

Steve Martin

For he who is unmusical is a child in music; he who is without letters is a child in learning; he who is untaught, is a child in life.

Epictetus

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts — as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.

Herbert Spencer Essays on Education (1861)

I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend?

Richard Stallman Thus Spake Stallman (2000)

When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again.

Eric Dolphy

At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music.

Hermann Hesse Gertrude (1910)

Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express.

Claude Debussy Debussy (1989)

It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.

Claude Debussy The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (2003)

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