Top 100 The Language Of Music Quotes
#1. Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don't think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.
Spike Jonze
#2. The known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar, and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken.
Hermann Hesse
#3. The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.
Gioachino Rossini
#4. How can you understand the language of music, if you will not be an instrument? - Zarost
Greg Hamerton
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Music is the only language which can be understood by everyone - even a tree can understand music.
Debasish Mridha
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Music is that universal language which unifies the spirits of mankind.
Paul Horn
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Music is the eternal language of love for every living species.
Debasish Mridha
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.
Debasish Mridha
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.
David Mitchell
#27. 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
#28. Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Music is the language of the heart; it makes our soul dance with joy.
Debasish Mridha
#36. In music, she'd found a perfect language, a way of expressing the inexpressible.
Emma Raveling
#37. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#38. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Janet Fitch
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. It is the body, subject to the harmony of the steps it is executing, which speaks. And it speaks to the heart in as direct a language as does music.
Natalia Makarova
#51. Music was language in our house. It was air ... I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.
Renee Fleming
#52. Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.
Clifford Odets
#53. Music is the language of soul; it can express the deepest feelings of life which language cannot touch.
Debasish Mridha
#54. Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#55. Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
#56. And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies.
Dan Bern
#57. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Steven Pinker
#58. Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.
Martin Luther
#59. I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.
Alice McDermott
#60. Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.
David Bowie
#61. Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
Cornel West
#62. The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.
Antonin Artaud
#63. The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.
Carl Maria Von Weber
#64. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
C. K. Williams
#65. If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
#66. When words fail to express the exalted sentiments and finer emotions of the human heart, music becomes the sublimated language of the soul, the divine instrumentality for its higher utterance.
Hans Hinrich Wendt
#67. Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#68. I am convinced that music really is the universal language of beauty which can bring together all people of good will on earth
Pope Benedict XVI
#69. My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.
Andrew Bird
#70. The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.
Daniel Tammet
#71. Hip-hop started as this niche moment, and the values of it, the cultures that it carried on its back; language, clothes, the way you wear your clothes, the items that you consume, all came with the music as an art form. And those things helped transform how people buy, shop, speak, engage.
Steve Stoute
#72. Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.
Quincy Jones
#73. I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.
Alasdair Gray
#74. Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.
Marianne Wiggins
#75. I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.
Franz Wright
#76. I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.
Irvine Welsh
#77. Black Sabbath - one of the world's universal language of music. I felt proud, for three or four minutes of my life combining my voice with Tony Iommi's guitar sound.
Henry Rollins
#78. Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!
Lori R. Lopez
#79. Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.
Constance Hale
#80. I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater.
Mos Def
#81. I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.
Thom Yorke
#82. Music is the language of the soul. It touches our deepest perceptions of being. Everyone understands music in his or her own way. Even animals understand music and respond to it with deep appreciation and love.
Debasish Mridha
#83. When God created Man, he gave him Music as a language different from all other languages. And early man sang his glory in the wilderness; and drew the hearts of kings and moved them from their thrones.
Khalil Gibran
#84. I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.
Jessye Norman
#85. Music is the language of the soul, the voice of the heart, and a message from the eternity.
Debasish Mridha
#86. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
#87. I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#88. I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
Jane Hirshfield
#89. Cartoonist Walt Disney has made the twentieth century's only important contribution to music. Disney has made use of music as language.
Jerome Kern
#90. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
Michael Cunningham
#91. Music is a language of emotion. I'm passionate about it because I think it's the most direct way to connect to the things that are ineffable. Words just aren't necessary a good enough opportunity to express. Words are maybe less than accessible at expressing.
Adrian Grenier
#93. For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
Donna Tartt
#94. Music is the language of God. God's language, music, is not like mathematics or geometry. It is a language of love. If we love music, that is enough.
Sri Chinmoy
#95. I've long believed that the gods give us the music we're supposed to hear at the times we're supposed to hear it, because all music, even lyrical and regardless of language performed in, is in and of itself an inherently magical language that can, at proper times, speak to the soul.
Ruadhan J. McElroy
#96. Music is in the connection of human souls, speaking a language that needs no words. Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world. Frankie's
Mitch Albom
#97. All of our media is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn't find a speck of language lurking below the surface.
Kenneth Goldsmith
#98. At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
Tobias Hill
#99. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Rob Pike
#100. Music is enough of an expression that it doesn't really matter what the words are or what language it's in.
Gwenno
