Music Quotes

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

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

George Steiner

You can't really imagine music without technology.

Brian Eno

Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual language, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.

Sigmund Spaeth, The Art of Enjoy

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Brian Eno

I try to use my music to move these people to act.

Jimi Hendrix

Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.

Ronnie James Dio

The late Bill Nye once said I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Mark Twain

I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'

Pete Townshend

We're real people and we're a band that's been playing on the scene for a long time. We've made a lot of friends, and one enemy we've always had was the NME. They've always basically slated us and they've basically never ever written about the music.

Dan Hawkins

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

James Taylor

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Jeffrey Tate

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Aretha Franklin

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Noel Coward

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Lauren Bacall

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

John Milton Cage

Music fills the infinite between two souls.

Rabindranath Tagore

The reason kids like rock 'n roll is their parents don't.

Mitch Miller

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Oscar Wilde