Top 100 Bach's Quotes
#1. If all the music written since Bach's time should be lost, it could be reconstructed on the foundation which Bach laid.
Charles Gounod
#2. All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.
(on Bach)
Arnold Bax
#3. Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach's second partita.
Ian McEwan
#4. Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.
Joshua Bell
#5. I made sure no butt cheek hung out. You know, the original Daisy, Catherine Bach's shorts were shorter than mine.
Jessica Simpson
#6. I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.
Mahan Esfahani
#7. Jessica's Daisy Dukes are even shorter than Catherine Bach's, which I honestly didn't think was possible.
Jay Chandrasekhar
#8. Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
Nina Simone
#9. When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.
George Shearing
#10. Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
Ben Bagdikian
#11. Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
Edward Abbey
#12. She wore an A-line bridal gown with a V-shaped neckline while Apollo playing Bach's Air on the G string.
Tai
#13. It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.
Eric Siblin
#14. You like sequences," Fuka-Eri asked, without a question mark. "To me, they're like Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. I never get tired of them.
Haruki Murakami
#15. he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach's Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel.
Gregory Benford
#16. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.
Emil Cioran
#17. Each time we explore Bach's music we feel as if we have traveled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape
John Eliot Gardiner
#18. I think J.S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets, but also as good as it gets, period
as good as existence, reality, life and the world.
Andrew W.K.
#20. I want Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D played at my funeral. If it isn't I shall jolly well want to know why.
Sybil Thorndike
#21. I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.
Caroline Shaw
#22. Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain De Botton
#23. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear's gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
Richard Bach
#24. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C.S. Lewis
#26. Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that sharp, cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock wears off.
Richard Bach
#27. Badminton is not popular in the U.S. because I think the mentality of badminton has to change.
Howard Bach
#28. Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!
Richard Bach
#29. You're master of what you've lived,
artisan at what you're living,
amateur at what's next to live.
Richard Bach
#30. With every decision that anyone makes, the world changes. The decision that we give our consent to is the one that remains in our consciousness, but the one that we didn't make-that alternate world goes on in its own direction. So there's uncountable numbers of alternate "us-es."
Richard Bach
#31. It's too easy to do your own site to not have one these days. I guess everyone has one.
Sebastian Bach
#32. I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
#33. I get noticed for different things I've done in different areas of town. If I'm in a rock club, it'll be Skid Row, if I'm in a mall it's the 'Gilmore Girls.'
Sebastian Bach
#34. Listen,' he said. 'It's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.
Richard Bach
#35. The earlier you start, the easier it is to accumulate major wealth. Still, it's never really too late to begin.
David Bach
#36. I just use all the skills that I learned in film school, and I just incorporate them into my sketches. People don't realize that, with a story, there has to be a beginning, middle and end. There has to be a problem and a resolution. Just because it's six seconds doesn't mean it's not a story.
King Bach
#37. Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
#38. I have assigned many of my father's basses to students, without endangering their lives. Also, they do no harm to the fingers.
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
#39. Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.
Richard Bach
#40. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#42. On one of those rare occasions when Bach appraised his own life's work, he remarked: I worked hard.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#43. Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. It's only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.
Richard Bach
#44. An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown
Richard Bach
#45. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.
Pablo Casals
#46. I have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there's always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun.
Rivers Cuomo
#47. How many of us count fictional characters, or those we've never met, among our closest friends? My hand's up.
Richard Bach
#48. J.S. Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.
Roger Fry
#49. I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#50. I used to live in Canada. It's a beautiful country with a lot of different kind of topographic regions.
Sebastian Bach
#51. It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#52. It's important to play the pieces that you feel you can play well. It was always my dream to play Bach - my first love and fascination - Chopin, and Szymanowski.
Rafal Blechacz
#53. Almost everything The Beatles did was great, and it's hard to improve on. They were our Bach. The way to get around it may be to keep it as simple as possible.
T Bone Burnett
#54. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
Richard Bach
#55. When I read in Fortune magazine that Warren Buffet, the billionaire investor and one of the world's richest men, was investing in a direct sales (network marketing) company, I decided I was missing something.
David Bach
#56. The beginning [of a journey] is a terrible time to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance. In self-directed education, a lot of the value comes from exploiting opportunities that arise well out to sea, once I've seen some things and begun the learning process.
James Marcus Bach
#57. I've owned 41 airplanes. A few of them would talk with me. This little seaplane, though, we've had long conversations in flight. There's a spirit in anything, I think, into which we weave our soul. Not many pilots talk about it, but they think about it in the quiet dark of a night flight.
Richard Bach
#58. I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing.
Cheryl Mendelson
#59. Bach is how buildings got taller. It's how we got to the moon.
Charles Mingus
#60. 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
#61. If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.
Richard Bach
#62. 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
#63. Financial education needs to become a part of our national curriculum and scoring systems so that it's not just the rich kids that learn about money.. it's all of us.
David Bach
#64. This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.
Robert Bly
#65. Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?
Holly Black
#66. Are you telling me that even though it's changing every second, the sky is always a perfect sky?
Richard Bach
#67. You ever heard of a guy named Jeff Buckley? He's one of the best singers I've ever heard.
Sebastian Bach
#68. But if you think there's a man anywhere who can make me do anything I don't want to do, you haven't been paying attention.
Rachel Bach
#69. He was leaning back on his bench, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Why would Charkov sleep with you?" "Gee, I don't know," I said, glowering. "Maybe because he's got good taste?
Rachel Bach
#70. It's not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.
Richard Bach
#72. David Duchovny is a dream; a dreamboat and a dream. He was so kind ... He held my hand after we were done shooting and told me I did great. He's so good at what he does.
Jillian Bach
#74. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#75. There's so much to learn! And just when we think, "I've got it. I really understand what's going on," we're shown a whole new stage set on which to play.
Richard Bach
#76. Life is not easy. But that's not the only truth that matters in this context. It also happens to be true that it takes just as much effort to have a "bad life," in which you don't get what you want, as it does to have a "good life," where you do. So given the choice, why not go for the good life?
David Bach
#77. Don't fear change. It's always for the best.
Richard Bach
#78. Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that's all right. You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.
Richard Bach
#79. You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology
Paul McCreesh
#80. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
Henry Miller
#81. In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, "Why me?" There's a reason, of course, there's an answer.
Richard Bach
#82. Most wine knowledge does not directly enhance the pleasures to be had in drinking wine but, rather, enhances one's ability to discover such pleasures
Kent Bach
#83. The world is a dream, you say, and it's lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky."
"No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?
Richard Bach
#84. If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple.
David Russell
#85. TV is so seductive with a great workday. You're going to work and making people laugh, and that's fantastic.
Jillian Bach
#86. My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.
James Brown
#87. The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.
George Steiner
#88. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
Richard Bach
#89. It's easy to live the expected and conventional. It's when you live the unexpected that you start having fun with your life.
Richard Bach
#90. I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
#91. That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way is winning.
Richard Bach
#92. In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.
Holly Black
#93. Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad.
Mike Patton
#94. I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
A.R. Rahman
#95. One way to pick a future is to believe it's inevitable.
Richard Bach
#96. I can't drink whiskey like I used to back then, that's for sure.
Sebastian Bach
#97. On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Maya Angelou
#98. Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.
Walt Disney Company
#99. That's why love stories don't have endings! They don't have endings because love doesn't end.
Richard Bach
#100. I know there's a principle of spirit. It works without space-time. I am subject to that principle, in spirit and in belief of body. Learn how spirit works, a few simple rules, living a perfect spiritual life is easy.
Richard Bach
