Quotes About Music

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

The good composer is slowly discovered, the bad composer is slowly found out.

Oboe - an ill woodwind that nobody blows good.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

Mozart is the human incarnation of the divine force of creation.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

She was an aging singer who had to take every note above 'A' with her eyebrows.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls, As if that soul were fled.

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is no moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?

And the night shall be filled with music And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.

The angel of spring, the mellow-throated nightingale.

If I had my life to live over, I wish I could be a great pianist or something.

Use what talents you have; the woods would have little music if no birds sang their song except those who sang best.

Bed is the poor man's opera.

Epigram: a wisecrack that has played Carnegie Hall.