Music - Quotes

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music. - Daniel J. Levitin

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. - Aldous Huxley

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

All music jars when the soul's out of tune. - Miguel de Cervantes

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony? - Leonardo DaVinci

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

I saw my music, and indeed all pop music, as simply a form of entertainment, a way to please audiences for an hour or two, in live concert or on an album. What I failed to understand then, but came to learn again and again, is the incredible power that music possesses – the power to heal, to shape destiny, even to change lives. A popular song may be three minutes of not terribly profound poetry, but the right combination of words and music can touch people at their very core. - Anne Murray

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

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning. - Plato

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. - Henry David Thoreau

If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land. - Mencius

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. - Benjamin Britten

It is one thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe. - Alex Ross

Kind words are the music of the world. - Unknown

Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try. - Mary Kay Ash

Music can change the world because it can change people. - Bono

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

Music does bring people together. It allows us to experience the same emotions. People everywhere are the same in heart and spirit. No matter what language we speak, what color we are, the form of our politics or the expression of our love and our faith, music proves: We are the same. - John Denver

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent. - Victor Hugo

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. - Plato

Music has charms to soothe a savage beast. - William Congreve

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. Lao Tzu

Music is a fantastic peace-keeper of the world, it is integral to harmony, and it is a required fundamental of human emotion. - Xun Zi

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents. - Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. - Plato

Music is a science that teaches how sound, under certain measures of time and tune, may be produced, and so ordered and disposed, as, either in consonance, or succession, or both, they may raise various sensations from the height of rapture even to melancholy or distraction. - Wellins Calcott

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. - Jean Paul Richter

Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of music we like – the equivalent to grammar in spoken or signed languages – and to be able to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won't. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music. - Daniel J. Levitin

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light. - Claude Debussy

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. - Oscar Wilde

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart. - Pablo Casals

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. - Kahlil Gibran

Music is the link between earth and heaven. - Lewis F. Korns

Music is the universal language of mankind. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize. - Napoleon Bonaparte

Music lends grace and dignity to life; it softens care, alleviates regrets, refines and enlivens sensibility, links the ideal to the actual, and suggests a flow of life in unison with its harmonies. - Christian Nestell Bovee

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

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. - Confucius

Music recalls a state of feeling, and not merely a series of incidents. When we listen to the long-forgotten melody, we do not review the scenes and actions of our childhood in succession, but we become for the moment children once again. - Arthur Helps

Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it a rest. - Unknown

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t. - Johnny Depp

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. - Maya Angelou

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. - Berthold Auerbach

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. - G. K. Chesterton

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. - Plato

Music, once admitted to the soul becomes ... a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory. - Edward Bulwer Lytton

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

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

Not only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others! - E. H. Chapin

Psychologists have found that music does things to you whether you like it or not. Fast tempos invariably raise your pulse, respiration, and blood pressure; slow music lowers them. - Doron K. Antrim

The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words. - Jose Saramago

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

The field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void. - Marcel Proust

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable. - W.H. Auden

The only truth is music. - Jack Kerouac

The purpose of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. - Unknown

There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. - Minnie Aumonier

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. - George Eliot

There’s music in the sighing of a reed; There’s music in the gushing of a rill; There’s music in all things, if we have ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres. - Lord Byron

We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul. - Willie Nelson

We are working in a field of mystical resonance, sound and vibration … that’s what makes people cry, laugh and feel their hair stand up. - Carlos Santana

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

When the music changes, so does the dance. - West African Proverb

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

Where words leave off, music begins. - Heinrich Heine

With the right music, you either forget everything or you remember everything. - Unknown

Without music, life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Words must ever sound so feeble in attempting to express the magic power of melody. - Arthur Helps