MUSIC QUOTES III

quotations about music

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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

JEAN COCTEAU

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The passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

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Music is another lady that talks charmingly and says nothing.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

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O Music! language of the soul,
Of love, of God to man;
Bright beam from heaven thrilling,
That lightens sorrow's weight.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

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Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

HERBERT SPENCER

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Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

PLATO

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Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have here below.

JOSEPH ADDISON

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Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

JOHN MILTON

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Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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I wish my life had background music so I could understand what the hell is going on.

ANONYMOUS

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What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

KEN LIVINGSTONE

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Toyish airs please trivial ears.

FRANCIS QUARLES

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I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

ELIZABETH BISHOP

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The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental--that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.

ADAM PHILLIPS

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Music is a language lovers understand
Melody and romance wander hand in hand
Cupid never fails assisted by a band
So if you have something sweet to tell her
Say it with music

IRVING BERLIN

Tags: Irving Berlin

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Hark to the music! How beneath the strain
Of reckless revelry, vibrates and sobs
One fundamental chord of constant pain,
The pulse-beat of the poet's heart that throbs.

EMMA LAZARUS

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Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

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Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

DANIEL J. LEVITIN

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Who first said that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, I know not; but that it is true, I am sure. Who has not felt the melting power of music, and stopped to listen to the sweet strains of some simple melody which has brought, or nearly brought, tears to his eyes? Where is the breat that has not been stirred by the cathedral organ, and choristers echoing their sacred strains through the aisles and corridors, and dying away, as it were, in heaven above? Will not the sweet but simple ballad of "Home, Sweet Home," when sung in a foreign land, wake memories from the dead, and melt the hardest heart; rouse every grand, noble, unselfish, and patriotic feeling in the breast, and carry the hearer thousands of miles across the storm-tossed oceans and seas that separate him from his own beloved country, the dwelling place of those near and dear to him, the model land of his heart, the resting place of his sires, his adored and honored fatherland.

T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH

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The music, yearning like a God in pain.

JOHN KEATS

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