| The truest expression of a people is in its dance and music. -- Agnes de Mile |
| There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. -- Albert Schweitzer |
| After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. -- Aldous Huxley |
| Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. -- Anais Nin |
| The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. -- Andre Segovia |
| The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides. -- Artur Schnabel |
| A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. -- Benny Green |
| Entertainment is about telling everybody that everything is alright but music is on the side of the upsetters and that's where I'm at. -- Bill Bruford |
| Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes. -- Bill Cosby |
| To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument. -- Bill Evans |
| My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise...a part of yourself you never knew existed. -- Bill Evans |
| Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Bill Nye |
| I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy. -- Billy Joel |
| When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. -- Bob Hope |
| I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'. -- Bob Newhart |
| I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time. -- Bonnie Raitt |
| Play piano each morning, walk a mile, speak of what was going down with honesty and style. -- Chicago |
| Do you believe in rock 'n roll? Can music save your mortal soul? -- Don McLean |
| The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it. -- Donal Henahan |
| Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought. -- E.Y. Harburg |
| I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent. -- Edith Sitwell |
| Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings. -- Edward Gardner |
| I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to. -- Elvis Presley |
| A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out. -- Ernest Newman |
| There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''it appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune. -- Ezra Pound |
| There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another. -- Frank Zappa |
| All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff. -- Frank Zappa |
| Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best. -- Frank Zappa |
| Without music, life would be a mistake. -- Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Music is the vernacular of the human soul. -- Geoffrey Latham |
| In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain. -- George Szell |
| Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music. -- Gioacchino Rossini |
| Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers! -- Gioacchino Rossini |
| Where words fail, music speaks. -- Hans Christian Andersen |
| Country music is three chords and the truth. -- Harlan Howard |
| My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. -- Harry S. Truman |
| 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. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted. -- Henry David Thoreau |
| A song will outlive all sermons in the memory. -- Henry Giles |
| Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. -- Igor Stravinsky |
| A good composer does not imitate; he steals. -- Igor Stravinsky |
| It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself. -- J.S. Bach |
| I've outdone anyone you can name ? Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500. -- James Brown |
| If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piano. -- Jerry Lee Lewis |
| I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something. -- Jim Morrison |
| Those times I burned my guitar was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar. -- Jimi Hendrix |
| It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page. -- Joan Baez |
| Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because I listen to pop music? -- John Cusack (Rob Gordon) High Fidelity |
| Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. -- John Keats |
| There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. -- John Keats |
| Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. -- John Lennon |
| We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - Rock & Roll or Christianity. -- John Lennon |
| Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains. -- John Philip Sousa |
| Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below. -- Joseph Addison |
| I improvised, crazed by the music... Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone. -- Josephine Baker |
| Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first. -- Josh Billings |
| Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, you learn notes to play to the music of your soul. -- Katie Greenwood |
| The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air. -- Kenneth Miller |
| The piano's world encompasses glass-nerved virtuosi and stomping barrel-housers in fedoras; it is a world of pasture and storm, of perfumed smoke, of liquid mathematics. -- Kenneth Miller |
| No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery. -- Kenneth Miller |
| Music... Can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable. -- Leonard Bernstein |
| There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind. -- Louis Armstrong |
| All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song. -- Louis Armstrong |
| You don't need any brains to listen to music. -- Luciano Pavarotti |
| A lawyer's relationship to justice and wisdom is on a par with a piano tuner's relationship to a concert. He neither composes the music, nor interprets it - he merely keeps the machinery running. -- Lucille Kallen |
| Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman. -- Ludwig Van Beethoven |
| Only the pure in heart can make a good soup. -- Ludwig Van Beethoven |
| There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. -- M. Aumonier |
| Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain |
| I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of god. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us. -- Martin Luther |
| I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world, there's got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys. -- Marvin Gaye |
| Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -- Maya Angelou |
| Don't play what's there, play what's not there. -- Miles Davis |
| What is Jazz?... If you have to ask, you'll never know. -- Miles Davis |
| The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven't seen the joke yet. -- Oliver Herford |
| Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes |
| They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- 'please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.' -- Oscar Wilde |
| Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger itself, a part of humanity. I am a man first, an artist second. As a man, my first obligation is to welfare of my fellow men. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music - the means which God has given me - since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries. My contribution to world peace may be small, but at least I will have given all I can to an ideal I hold sacred. -- Pablo Casals |
| Music is an expression of sound that reflects the beauty of life. -- Paul Winter |
| Life is a short warm moment, and death is a long cold rest. You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye, in 80 years with luck, or even less. -- Pink Floyd |
| For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. -- Pink Floyd |
| For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. -- Plato |
| Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease; and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord. -- Plutarch |
| Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -- Red Auerbach |
| Talent works, genius creates. -- Robert Schumann |
| We've heard that a million monkeys at a keyboard could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert Wilensky |
| There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it. -- Ron Wood |
| Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable. -- Samuel Johnson |
| The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. -- Sir Thomas Beecham |
| There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between. -- Sir Thomas Beecham |
| To love is like playing the piano. First, you must learn to play by the rules. Then, you must forget the rules and play from your heart. -- Source Unknown |
| One thing I can tell you is we got to be free. -- The Beatles |
| Thinking is the best way of traveling. -- The Moody Blues |
| There are no wrong notes. -- Thelonious Monk |
| Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. -- Thomas Carlyle |
| Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts. -- Thomas Eliot |
| Om... We play music to align the spirit. -- Traditional Hindu Saying |
| Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. -- Unknown |
| It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music. -- Ursula Le Guin |
| Music is spiritual. The music business is not. -- Van Morrison |
| Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats. -- on playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan. -- Victor Borge |
| I do not have a single white note on my piano; my elephant smoked too much. -- Victor Borge |
| Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -- Victor Hugo |
| Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or to bend a knotted oak. -- William Congreve |
| If music be the food of love, play on. -- William Shakespeare |
| The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; the motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus: let no such man be trusted. -- William Shakespeare |
| Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous. -- Yehudi Menuhin |
| All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds! -- Yoko Ono |
| We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. -- Zelda Fitzgerald |