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We could try to dig deep into the whole meaning and the magic of music, but knowing that we’d ultimately fail at such a profound task, why not read what truly smart people had to say about this amazing phenomenon instead? And it’s not like you’ll have to comb through the entirety of the internet to find the best quotes reflecting on the essence of music, as we’ve gathered the ultimate list right here! So, if you wish to read some wise words about music, its purpose, and its mystique, try our picks right down below.
And it isn’t like these music quotes came from someone who doesn’t have the slightest idea about the ins and outs of creating sounds. On the contrary, most of these beautiful quotes come from famous musicians and composers, while others - from famous people who definitely know the best way to deliver their thoughts in an easily understandable yet effective way. Either way, these quotes about music do a great job of explaining the importance and undeniable effects it has on people.
Want to learn more? Well then, scroll on down below and check out our list of the best music quotes we’ve found. Once you are there, be sure to vote for your favorite quotes and share this article with those who cannot imagine their lives without music!
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#1
"Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t." - Johnny Depp
#2
"Without music, life would be a blank to me." - Jane Austen
#3
“You can cage the singer but not the song.” - Harry Belafonte
#4
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent." - Victor Hugo
#5
"Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing." - Rebbe Nachman
#6
"Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness." - Jason Mraz
#7
“Music is an outburst of the soul.” - Frederick Delius
#8
"When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present." - Alan Watts
#9
"My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die." - Bob Marley
#10
“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.” - Robert Fripp
#11
“Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.” - Hans Christian Anderson
#13
"My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require." - Edward Elgar
#14
"Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape." - Shania Twain
#16
"Music is the strongest form of magic." - Marilyn Manson
#17
"I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing." - William James
#18
"I believe that a person’s taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know." - Leila Sales
#19
“The world’s most famous and popular language is music.” - Psy
#20
"I think music in itself is healing. It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we’re from, everyone loves music." - Billy Joel
#21
"Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die." - Paul Simon
#22
“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.” - Lao Tzu
#24
"Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought." - Yip Harburg
#25
"Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory." - Oscar Wilde
#26
"Where words fail, music speaks." - Hans Christian Anderson
#27
"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest." - Henry David Thoreau
#28
"The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers." - Roy Ayers
#29
"The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with." - Bruce Springsteen
#30
"If you’ve lost your faith in love and music then the end won’t be long." - Pete Doherty
#31
"Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." - Ludwig van Beethoven
#32
"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." - Frank Zappa
#33
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#34
"Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life." - John Paul Friedrich Richter
#35
"Music is the universal language of mankind." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#36
"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." - Bob Marley
#37
"How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?" - Jane Swan
#38
"A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra." - Guy de Maupassant
#39
“Music is love in search of a word.” - Sidney Lanier
#40
"Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common." - Sarah Dessen
#41
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Berthold Auerbach
#42
"Music gives color to the air of the moment." - Karl Lagerfeld
#43
"Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
#44
"Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart." - Pablo Casals
#45
"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats." - Albert Schweitzer
#46
“He who sings frightens away his ills.” - Miguel de Cervantes
#47
"Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway." - Emory Austin
#48
"Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them." - Louis Armstrong
#49
"Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn’t." - Gene Simmons
#50
"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art." - Claude Debussy
#51
"I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others." - James Taylor
#52
"My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever." - Bob Marley
#53
"Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond." - Ray Charles
#54
"Music – what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!" - Maria von Trapp
#56
"To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable." - Aaron Copland
#57
"Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference." - Herbie Hancock
#58
"Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours." - Elton John
#59
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." - Friedrich Nietzsche
#62
"A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?" - Dave Grohl
#68
"Music is everybody’s business. It’s only the publishers who think people own it." - John Lennon
#69
"Music – that’s been my education. There’s not a day that goes by that I take it for granted." - Billie Joe Armstrong
#70
"I’ve always said music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think." - Kenny Rogers
#71
"Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul." - Johann Sebastian Bach
#74
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of god was music." - Kurt Vonnegut
#75
"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
#76
"Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends." - Alphonse de Lamartine
#77
"Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize." - Napoleon Bonaparte
#78
"Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa – Who knows most, knows least." - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#79
"The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be." - Pete Seeger
#80
"The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable." - W.H. Auden
#81
"I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments." - John Barrowman
#82
"There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard." - Sun Tzu
#83
"Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music." - Marcel Marceau
#84
"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." - Sergei Rachmaninov
#85
"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." - Maya Angelou
#87
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make." - Truman Capote
#93
"Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf." - Baruch Spinoza
#97
"Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician’s curse." - Patrick Rothfuss
#98
"The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life." - Rob Sheffield
#99
"Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there’s no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door." - Jerry Seinfeld
#100
"Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones." - Keith Richards
#101
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." - Plato
#103
"We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters." - Eddie Van Halen
#104
"The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start." - Jodi Picoult
#105
"For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall." - Eric Clapton
#107
"There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original." - Franz Joseph Haydn
#109
"If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practicing, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary." - Robert Schumann
#110
"If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music." - Gustav Mahler
#112
"Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking." - Nina Simone
#115
"People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song." - Michael Jackson
#117
"To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?" - Michael Jackson
#118
"Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it’s not OK, but you can change it." - Bono
#120
"Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening." - Aretha Franklin
#121
"Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe." - Douglas Adams
#122
"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music." - Albert Einstein
#123
"If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week." - Charles Darwin
#124
"Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays." - Oscar Wilde
#125
"A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good." - Colbie Caillat
#127
"I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow." - Bryce Anderson
#130
"Music isn’t just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It’s a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it’s joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven." - Orson Scott Card
#132
"Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile." - Nicholas Sparks
#133
"Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing." - John Erskine
#135
"If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple." - Vera Nazarin
#136
"Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself." - Henry Ward Beecher
#139
"Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies." - Edward Bulwar Lytton
#140
"A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence." - Leopold Stokowski
#142
"I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet." - Ludwig van Beethoven
#143
"Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvelous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man." - Frédéric Chopin
#145
"He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you." - Hannah Harrington
#146
"Live your truth. Express your love. Share your enthusiasm. Take action towards your dreams. Walk your talk. Dance and sing to your music. Embrace your blessings. Make today worth remembering." - Steve Maraboli
#147
"To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it." - Osho
#148
"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife." - Kahlil Gibran
#149
"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn." - Charlie Parker
#150
"Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words." - Robert G. Ingersoll
#151
"Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens." - Maria von Trapp
#153
"Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm." - Thomas Merton
#156
"Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me." - Eddie Van Halen
#157
"Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity." - Oliver Sacks
#158
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley
#161
"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide." - Pat Conroy
What do you think ?
Uncle Bud 2 years ago
There are some really awesome quotes. I stopped in #95. I'll have to come back and read the others.
Rupert Gorman 2 years ago
Yeah I didn't read them all either. However I enjoyed many of them.
Load More Replies...
amanda strachan 2 years ago
The texture of a mans soul can be measured by the music he chooses.
Uncle Bud 2 years ago
There are some really awesome quotes. I stopped in #95. I'll have to come back and read the others.
Rupert Gorman 2 years ago
Yeah I didn't read them all either. However I enjoyed many of them.
Load More Replies... amanda strachan 2 years ago
The texture of a mans soul can be measured by the music he chooses.
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