Quotes About Music

The music that can deepest reach and cure all ill is cordial speech.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If the singer sings from a sense of duty or from seeing no way of escape, I had rather have none.

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

The stars have us to bed: Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. Music

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down...

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

Suppose churches taught that God is happy and that he is the source of all happiness. Suppose Christians believed that God calls them to view work, play, music, food, and drink as gracious gifts from God's hand to be responsibly enjoyed within the parameters of his commands.

Of all the religions in the world, there is none with the wealth of music that the Christian faith offers.

Johann Sebastian Bach once said that the only purpose for music should be the glory of God and the re-creation of the human spirit.

Without words life would be inexpressible. Even the best of emotions beg for a verbal expression. That is why the musician reaches not just to the melody but to the romance of language to bring harmony to life.

I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?

We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen.

The merry-go-round was running, yes, but... It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.

The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free. - Green Shadows, White Whale

Sure, it's money runs the world, Doone agreed, seated there. But it is music that holds down the friction.

A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head.

My favorite tune was "'Tain't No Sin, To Take Off Your Skin, and Dance Around in Your Bones.

Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, clash of pan, laughter.

All floated upon an evening carousel, with fitful drifts of music wafting up here and there, and voices calling and murmuring from houses that were whitely haunted by television.

He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast

The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.

while under the unsteady hand of the statesman of Sambir the Trovatore fitfully wept, wailed, and bade good-bye to his Leonore again and again in a mournful round of tearful and endless iteration.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712: "Music is the occulted arithmetic exercise of a soul that does not know it is counting.