Of Music Quotes

#1. When I was very young, there was a lot of music at home, mostly jazz. I was walking around singing and pretending I was in bands from a very young age. But the first song that was really personal to me was 'Blue Suede Shoes'.

Nile Rodgers

#2. There wasn't a lot of music in the home when I was growing up. We didn't have a piano or anything like that but my grandmother, had been a well-known piano teacher.

George Brandis

#3. I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.

Tod Machover

#4. I'm a huge fan of a lot of different genres of music, and I really felt like somehow I had been pigeonholed a little bit - maybe of my own doing - and in a way where I felt like I was sort of falsely defined. What my music was being called wasn't really the music I was always listening to.

Kathleen Edwards

#5. A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.

Yo-Yo Ma

#6. Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

Lisa See

#7. If you're dreaming of being a great soloist, walking on stage, receiving ovations night after night, having money thrown at you, girls chasing after you and your beautiful picture - that's wonderful. But what exactly does that have to do with the practice of music ?

Wu Han

#8. The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that.

David Byrne

#9. He was nearly asleep when he heard a voice, a melody so unearthly and beautiful he glanced up at the sky, expecting to see heaven opened and an angel of music. But all he saw were a few stars winking above him through the leaves.

Melanie Dickerson

#10. Bruce Smith is a tender master of music, and beautiful lines, and complex thoughts, and fascinating wild personal and cultural references.

Gerald Stern

#11. I wanted to bring back that big, ballad type of music that we used to love so much. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, when they first came out, that's what I grew up singing.

LaToya London

#12. I've had so many hot, cheesy, corny loves of music in my life. I had a very intense Billy Joel period. So once you've really Joeled it up - there's some good periods of Joel; it's not all hot cheese. But I can't judge anyone else for their cheese. I've deep-sea dived in the Gouda.

Jack Black

#13. I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.

Joshua Bell

#14. It's never been seen that a street artist go as far as I've gone - keep consistent without wanting to do a bunch of ventures outside of music to keep my face out there.

Nas

#15. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

#16. I'm writing songs that connect to millions of people. And that happens for a reason. I don't really worry too much about people who aren't into it because that's the beauty of music. It's subjective. If every single person in the world loved our music, then that'd be weird.

Matthew Healy

#17. One of the things that was a blessing for me is my parents were music lovers. Neither of my parents played an instrument, but they were avid record buyers. And I grew up at every age listening to all kinds of music.

Gustavo Santaolalla

#18. A friend of mine once told me that I can't screw up when I play my own music. I also take voice lessons, play other peoples' songs out of music books, and occasionally figure out how to play other people's music from records. This keeps my ears, fingers, and mind working.

Lisa Loeb

#19. It is a process of finding the right music then planning a costume to fit that style of music.

Nancy Kerrigan

#20. I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

Brian Eno

#21. I think everybody can agree that you can hear a certain song and it will put you in a certain mood, and that's just the beauty of music and I am so inspired by that.

Shaun White

#22. The work I've done through my Common Culture Music series has enabled me not only to share my joy of music at scale but also promote the artists I love.

Connor Franta

#23. The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.

Phillips Brooks

#24. When the movie's done, you talk about either the score or source music over a particular scene, what might work. You just throw a piece of music over the scene, and we both listen to it.

Ethan Coen

#25. That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

Dave Brubeck

#26. Rock and roll came in and changed my life and changed the whole music scene forever, and then I grew to love R&B and Motown and all black music, gospel music. But I never dismiss any form of music. I listen to everything.

Elton John

#27. My life revolves around music and always will. I need to be a part of music and not an observer.

Rick Wakeman

#28. Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."

Pete Seeger

#29. Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

Billy Joel

#30. I've kind of codified certain things for myself, rhythmic patterns and mechanical ways of using the bow to create layers of rhythm. What I'm trying to do is to create a complete piece of music on one instrument.

Bruce Molsky

#31. I've realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience.

Tom DeLonge

#32. The highest mission of music is to serve as a link between God and Man.

Corinne Heline

#33. Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

George Crumb

#34. One of the great gifts of being a human being is that you can get rid of yourself and enter into the oneness of music.

Ray Manzarek

#35. The style of music that we're playing, this progressive metal style, has always been an upstream battle for us. We don't usually get a lot of commercial exposure.

John Petrucci

#36. I would say country is the one type of music I've spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock.

Connie Britton

#37. I went to a Catholic all-girls school, and we would play cassettes of music we liked, and when it was my turn, they would laugh at my choices. I would play Billie Holliday, Elmore James and Howlin' Wolf, but it was fine; if I had to listen to their choices, they had to listen to mine.

Imelda May

#38. My inspiration always comes from different places. Sometimes it's a piece of music or being in nature or seeing a film or reading a magazine. I find inspiration everywhere.

Marie Forleo

#39. As soon as I started writing the first batch, I had a vision. I saw me on stage playing a certain type of music. I want to take these blues melodies over aggressive guitars. I heard the sound I wanted to make. I knew what I wanted to do. It wasn't ever there before.

Benjamin Booker

#40. Many say that life entered the human body by the help of music, but the truth is that life itself is music.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#41. I use all different kinds of techniques for all different types of music. The music dictates the style.

John Patitucci

#42. What I like is when you can hear the heart and soul of music and can feel the energy coming out of it, because that's what it's like when you drive.

Allan McNish

#43. With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

Bear McCreary

#44. When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

Daniel Hope

#45. My mother was devoted to helping people - with my father's money! - who had great voices but didn't have the financial means to study music. He and my mum gave away dozens of music scholarships, and my mum opened a school in town, introduced opera to children and created fantastic programmes.

Salma Hayek

#46. I think I have every piece of music Bob Marley ever made.

Kamala Harris

#47. I realize that I'm not going to be everybody's cup of tea, and that's okay. I think that's the point of music.

Kacey Musgraves

#48. No one starts playing my kind of music to make a fortune. But I do want to keep doing what I do and I do want to continue selling records. And I would, eventually, quite like some money.

Laura Marling

#49. Because one of the properties of music is to entertain and to, I don't mean this lightly, distract us from the things that pull us down. Music should be not only a source for political ideas but also a source of hope.

Dave Matthews

#50. He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

James Salter

#51. Now we have so many different genres of music, it's amazing to me. Even in the gospel music arena, you've got hip-hop, you got contemporary, urban contemporary, you got traditional, you got neo-soul gospel, you've got all of these different things.

Marvin Sapp

#52. I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't.

Bruce Springsteen

#53. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

Steve Martin

#54. I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.

James Taylor

#55. I mean, the paradox is that whereas the screen, it seems to me - the cinema can absorb endless amounts of music, it cannot really with comfort absorb large amounts of words. Not nearly as many words, that is to say, as a stage can.

Bob Mondello

#56. I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

O. Henry

#57. When his veering gait And every motion of his starry train Seem governed by a strain Of music, audible to him alone.

William Wordsworth

#58. For us, it is all about breaking the boundaries between different genres of music and combining different styles of music and performing what we are passionate about. We are so lucky that we can experience both worlds: the more intimate classical world and the wild and crazy world of rock n' roll.

Luka Sulic

#59. The sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.

Aleister Crowley

#60. Each culture might lend its own dialect, but above all that is the language of music itself, and it doesn't care about politics or boundaries.

Geoff Zanelli

#61. I had somebody say to me once, 'You can't make the kind of music you're making and call yourself a feminist.' The door was slammed on them swiftly after that.

Lauren Mayberry

#62. Einstein said that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

Leonard Bernstein

#63. Theoretical concepts of music and extended techniques are more like seasoning to me; they're not the meal. I like outside music that still has a sense of forward motion and an emotive quality to it.

Gerard Cox

#64. When you're feeling down, did you know that you can change it in an instant? Put on a beautiful piece of music or start singing - that'll change your emotion.

Bob Proctor

#65. Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

Pierre Boulez

#66. What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

Twyla Tharp

#67. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Lawrence Lessig

#68. Discomfort is a pain. Boredom is a pain. A perfect piece of music can reduce us to tears. Every one of these pains is essential to the growth of the soul. Pain is part of the beauty of life. It enriches us.

Ruben Papian

#69. I keep a band of music in my ante-room," he said once to her. "It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within.

Henry James

#70. When I don't like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely

Florent Schmitt

#71. Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry.

Ernst Haas

#72. I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

Bela Bartok

#73. A well-rounded performer will listen to all kinds of music. I like classical, Middle Eastern, and rock a lot.

Patti LuPone

#74. Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy 'fetishization' of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

Slavoj Zizek

#75. Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Music.

Sun Ra

#76. I can only think of music as something inherent in every human being - a birthright. Music coordinates mind, body and spirit.

Yehudi Menuhin

#77. I started off when I was seven years old doing musicals. I was in 'Les Miserables' and 'The Sound of Music,' and my mum's an actress. My parents divorced when I was young, and when she couldn't find a babysitter, I was in the wings, sleeping.

Alicia Vikander

#78. Beauty of music enlightens the soul and fills it with ecstasy.

Debasish Mridha

#79. The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colors, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music.

Camille Saint-Saens

#80. He [ the son]'s grown up listening to all types of music, and the natural form of rebellion is to find the one genre that maybe he hasn't listened to and to make that his thing.

Solange Knowles

#81. I do listen to a lot of music, but I don't listen when I'm writing.

Yanni

#82. Mention Hubert Sumlin, as well, because Hubert's a great man, and again, you know, I don't play the guitar very good, but when I'm playing this kind of music, I always have him in my mind. I wish I could play like Hubert.

Elvis Costello

#83. The reality of music itself, which is the fabric of life for me, is where most of my attention is.

Pat Metheny

#84. I still listen to black metal all the time - that's obviously one of my favorite kinds of music - but I steer from it very strongly.

George Clarke

#85. Every now and then, a lot of bands doing the same kind of music will organically sprout up at once.

Kathy Valentine

#86. Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records.

Grandmaster Flash

#87. The sound of life, Everyone has got their own song playing in the background of their life , some has melody and some has depressing music and some extra ordinary people are standing their choosing the type of music that they want to play - Be that kind of people.

Alamvusha

#88. I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.

Michael Hersch

#89. The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

Madeleine Thien

#90. I played more of an advisory role with Public Enemy. I really trusted them to make the music that they wanted to make, and the way The Bomb Squad worked with the ... they created their whole own world of music.

Rick Rubin

#91. My sisters and I like a lot of different styles of music, but we're inspired by real artists like Beyonce and Adele.

China Anne McClain

#92. Classical music is a genre of music. It's no more complex or less complex than pop music or R&B. The elitism is weird.

Theo Hutchcraft

#93. Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn't consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done - unable to play except from paper.

Mary Lou Williams

#94. Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Georg Solti

#95. I don't sing country music because I'm not capable of singing other kinds of music; I sing it because I think it's the most beautiful kind of music there is.

Lee Ann Womack

#96. The common denominator is a love of music.

Natasha Bedingfield

#97. I was touched by the magic of music. My way to communicate was through my guitar and music.

Juanes

#98. To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

Clyde Tombaugh

#99. I forget what the official name of it was, but they did an all-day of roots music - every kind of music you can imagine from around the country - New Orleans Jazz to Indian flute players, R&B, you name it. I met and became good friends with (blues guitar player) Joe Louis Walker. He was on the show.

Scotty Moore

#100. Music to me is like breathing. I don't get tired of breathing, I don't get tired of music.

Ray Charles