Quotes About Music

The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch'd with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.

in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, the Scottish writer and politician Andrew Fletcher brilliantly linked music and civic life, writing, "I knew a very wise man…[ who] believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

There's something about the transporting capacity of music, something about it's odd but undeniable ability to create a collective experience by firing our individual imaginations, that's more likely to open our minds and our hearts to competing points of view.

The capacity of music to reassure and to remind is one of its cardinal virtues.

From 8 to 10 o'clock, practice music.16 From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day. From 3 to 4, read French. From 4 to 5, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bed-time, read English, write, etc.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times had reviewed a Greenwich Village performance by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan. "His clothes may need a bit of tailoring," Shelton wrote of Dylan, "but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano, and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

In his literary commonplace book, Jefferson transcribed these lines from a version of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: The Man who has not Music in his Soul, Or is not touch'd with Concord of sweet Sounds, Is fit for Treasons, Stratagems, & Spoils, The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night, And his Affections dark as Erebus: Let no such Man be trusted.

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews? Basically everything, except technical proficiency, Walter said. Right. But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck.

Finally there came a perfect storm of drafts from uptown and downtown, a big humid uric wind that swept the platform and then reversed itself, and reversed itself again, so that the dollar bills came levitating out of the guitar case and drifted up and down the platform like leaves in autumn, tumbling and skidding, while the band played on. It was perfectly beautiful and perfectly sad, and everybody on the platform knew it, nobody bent down to touch the money.

His recording career spans just a decade: Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the '70s.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.

Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger.

The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice.

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing Hey Jude. It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

No, I do not like music. (But what she really was trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.)

It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.

I'd write Ha ha ha! and instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs (..)

And instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

And I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books. I think the ideal experience of my book would be like listening to music.