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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:

Music is the one thing that is supposed to be the truth, especially in hip hop.

Sampa the Great

The hard truth is that most of our so called leaders and elite are culturally uninformed, illiterate and backward when it comes to music.

Tam Fiofori

Sometimes people like to listen to music; sometimes they like to dance to music. Sometimes they just want to get inspiration from music.”

Ali Kiba

Music is business and every business has its own season.

Ali Kiba

Our intention is to export local music.

Banjo Mosele

Disciplines like music, dance, poetry, films, art, ways of personal expression, etc., have always been an inspiration for what I do

Cedric Mizero

The air in music the wing forsakes.

John Muir

I don’t understand any music! I feel it. I want them to feel something! I don’t want them to understand it.

Samuel Adler

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

John Cage Lecture on Nothing (1949)

Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.

Aristotle

Thy voice is sweet, as if it took
Its music from thy face.
And word and mien, and step and look,
Are perfect in their grace.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

If I hadn't have had music in my life, it's quite possible I could be in here. Or nor even in here, be dead — and I'd much rather be alive.

James Hetfield

Rap music is just computerised crap. I listen to Top of the Pops and after three songs I feel like killing someone.

George Harrison The Beatles — After the Break-up : In Their Own Words (1991)

If you'd stop being a Metallica fan because I won't give you my music for free, then fuck you. I don't want you to be a Metallica fan.

Lars Ulrich

I saw firsthand where the music we made ended up. It turned up in sterile bullshit clubs in LA, separated from the spirit we made it in.

M.I.A.

Number 7; said to have been an old joke in the music-halls at the time the play was written.

John Osborne The Entertainer (1957)

I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years. And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.

Elvis Costello dig interview (2004)

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Georg Solti Conductors by John L. Holmes (1988)

Mathematics thought that there were numbers associated with tones—frequencies, wavelengths. Music, at its most fundamental level, was math.

Brandon Sanderson Rhythm of War (2020)

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