Top 100 Music Language Quotes
#1. Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
Leonard Bernstein
#2. For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.
T Bone Burnett
#3. O Music! language of the soul, Of love, of God to man; Bright beam from heaven thrilling, That lightens sorrow's weight.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#4. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#5. We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language ... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.
Lewis Thomas
#6. What is music? Music is language. A human being wants to express ideas in this language, but not ideas that can be translated into concepts ...
Anton Webern
#7. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#9. Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.
Ernest L. Boyer
#10. It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.
Victor L. Wooten
#11. That's what music did. It made you feel.
...
Music, her grandfather always told her, was language. A special language, a gift from the Muses, something all people are born understanding but few people can thoroughly translate.
Sara Zarr
#12. Mostly, I'm drawn to great characters and great worlds that use weird things for their language - whether it's dance, whether it's pop music with Justin Bieber, or whether it's magic.
Daniel Radcliffe
#13. I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show.
Alicia Keys
#14. To me, music is entertainment - what else can it be? In fact, it's the only language I know of that's universal.
Ray Charles
#15. There's something in music which is obviously beyond language itself. It's communication in its purest form.
Matthew Bellamy
#16. Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.
Mandy Patinkin
#17. Music is a second language to my heart.
Mara Arps
#18. I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work.
William Eggleston
#19. Music is the only language which can be understood by everyone - even a tree can understand music.
Debasish Mridha
#20. Music is a language that speaks to people emotions.
The Unknown
#21. There are Latino people in our world who believe strongly that if you are Latino you should speak the language, you should eat the food, you should listen to the music, you should be proud. And when you don't do those things, some people will look at it as if you're neglecting who you are.
Selenis Leyva
#22. Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.
T.L. Rese
#23. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#24. That old adage, that "music is a universal language", is really true. Even if all of the lyrics are understood, they seem to connect with it really well and in some ways, more so.
William Fitzsimmons
#25. Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.
Knut Hamsun
#26. Music is that universal language which unifies the spirits of mankind.
Paul Horn
#27. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.
Will Oldham
#28. Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities ... much more so than music or language.
Conrad Hall
#29. Music speaks from spirit to spirit and in that sense you could call it a true spiritual language.
John McLaughlin
#30. Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
T Bone Burnett
#31. We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.
Debbie Harry
#32. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#33. Music is the eternal language of love for every living species.
Debasish Mridha
#34. I decided to come back and teach goodness in this business. To teach love, because music is the universal language. We are God's bouquet, and through music we become one.
Little Richard
#35. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#36. Music is the language of the soul; and for two people of different nations or races to unite, there is no better means than music
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#38. The language of soul ... possesses a pronounced lyrical quality which is frequently incompatible to any music other than that ceaseless and relentlessly driving rhythm that flows from poignantly spent ideas.
Claude Brown
#40. The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light - grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
Eleanor Catton
#41. Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
Debasish Mridha
#42. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!
Pete La Roca
#43. Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#44. There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.
Lynn Shelton
#45. For music alone can abolish differences
of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.
Irene Nemirovsky
#46. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
Kenneth Branagh
#47. Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Allan Bloom
#48. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
Yael Naim
#49. Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.
David Mitchell
#50. I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.
Pablo Casals
#51. LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.
Ambrose Bierce
#52. Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
#53. Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.
Rosanne Cash
#54. Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.
Jeff Martin
#55. It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one.
Victor Wooten
#56. Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.
Paul Epworth
#57. Music is the language of some other state, born of memory. For what can wake the soul's strong instinct of some other world like music?
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#58. Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one ...
Iannis Xenakis
#59. Learn to feel sorry for music because, although it is the international language, it has no swear words.
Billy Connolly
#60. Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.
Howard Shore
#61. Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.
Pattiann Rogers
#62. I feel that music is more flexible than language and your song, or "piece" is only as flexible as your least flexible component.
Brian Chippendale
#63. People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.
Shirley Manson
#64. With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.
George C. Wolfe
#65. We think that this is just our world and we don't know what other people are thinking. Music actually is a phenomenal connector in that respect. It's a special language that defines certain boundaries and connects people in a particular way, a very emotional way, I have found.
Annie Lennox
#66. Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise.
K'naan
#67. Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge' ... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
Sufjan Stevens
#68. It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.
Nitin Sawhney
#69. I think it's really important these days to be able to relate to how the music flows and be able to speak the same language as your bandmates and the producer, rather than just talking drums.
Matt Cameron
#70. I love vocal music, but I've had a hard time understanding myself through the English language. So it just seemed to me that if I relied solely on creating a voice out of the music, then I might be able to reach something more profound.
Arca
#71. Music is the one universal language. It's your best friend when the chips are down, and it's better than any energy drink when you're feeling it.
Dave Smalley
#72. I've been in situations like in Tokyo where people sang my song word for word and then when the music stopped, they couldn't speak to me. I've seen the music break the language barrier.
Curtis Jackson
#73. Music is the language of the heart; it makes our soul dance with joy.
Debasish Mridha
#74. You know, I think music is very interactive. It's a - it's a language.
Jake Shimabukuro
#75. In music, she'd found a perfect language, a way of expressing the inexpressible.
Emma Raveling
#76. As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore. Or if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where so soon As in our native language can I find That solace?
John Milton
#78. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#79. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Janet Fitch
#80. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.
Frances Ridley Havergal
#81. Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
#82. The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.
Emmanuel Lubezki
#83. In these days of political, personal and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it's a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration and goodwill.
Robert Shaw
#84. 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
#86. I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
Sufjan Stevens
#88. Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time - everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language.
Will.i.am
#89. Make it, not make it? What's the difference? Music is a language, it's a dance of life, and it can be a part of your life without being something that earns.
Tina Weymouth
#90. Music, oh, how faint, how weak,
Language fades before thy spell!
Why should Feeling ever speak,
When thou canst breathe her soul so well?
Thomas Moore
#91. Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
Erol Ozan
#92. Love is the purest emotion in the world; music is the purest language.
Rae Lynn Blaise
#93. Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
Cornel West
#94. I find in music there's a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can't describe conversationally.
Sufjan Stevens
#95. Because it exists as a living sonority, music is animated by voices, and these voices do not evaporate when music confronts the insights of contemporary literary criticism, or philosophy of language.
Carolyn Abbate
#96. Music, the word we use in our everyday language, is nothing less than the picture of our Beloved. It is because music is the picture of our Beloved that we love music.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#97. First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.
Tom Robbins
#98. Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction ... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.
Evan Parker
#99. Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.
Tad Williams
#100. There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.
Marsha Norman
