QUOTATIONS ON MUSIC

"Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music."
-- Sergei Rachmaninoff

“Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” -Victor Hugo

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."
Frank Zappa

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture."
John Cage

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

"Genius is nothing more than a long, sustained patience."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."
Samuel Butler

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of every day life." - Berthold Auerbach

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." - Henry David Thoreau

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
William Congreve

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.-- Jean Genet

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.
Eric Hoffer

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
Samuel Johnson

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.--Johann Sebastian Bach

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be "Yes". And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer would be "No".--Aaron Copeland

"Music causes us to think eloquently." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.--Michel de Montaigne

"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

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.—Pat Conroy

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.—Geoffrey Latham

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs--Friedrich Nietzsche

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing-- Zimbabwe Proverb

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

"A man in music, as one in love, either lives it or talks about it; seldom both."
-- Ernst Bacon, Notes on the Piano, 1963

"Music is love in search of a word." -- Sidney Lanier, The Symphony, 1875

"Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music."
-- Sergei Rachmaninoff

"Music is the universal language of mankind."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

"Mathematics is music for the mind; music is mathematics for the soul."
-- Anonymous

A great pianist was once asked by an admirer, "How do you handle the notes as well as you do?" The artist replied, "The notes I handle no better than many pianists, but the pauses between the notes--ah, that is where the art resides!" –Arthur Schnabel.

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

Music expresses that which can not be said about that which it is impossible to be silent. –Victor Hugo.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness. –Lawrence Durrell

Why do we teach music? Not because we expect you to major in music. Not because we expect you to play and sing all your life. Not so you can relax. But so you will be human. So you will recognize beauty. So you will be sensitive. So you will have something to cling to. So you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good, in short, more life. Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live? That is why we teach music. –Unknown.