quotations about music
Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person.
SARAH DESSEN
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Just Listen
I wish my life had background music so I could understand what the hell is going on.
ANONYMOUS
My earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head. I remember standing under a piano at my grandmother's house, when the keys of the piano were higher than my head and kind of pressing down on the keys, and then hearing one note and then looking for another one to follow it, because you always -- you know, if you're a musician or if you're a songwriter, somehow when you hear one note, you hear another one.
BONO
interview, Larry King Weekend, Dec. 1, 2002
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, The Pleasure Instinct
Music is the link between earth and heaven.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Music is another lady that talks charmingly and says nothing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712
I don't read music. And my mom is this classically trained person, and I went the other way. And I think it's helped me write songs that I wouldn't have written if I were going at the technical way. Because they go, "Oh, you can't go from this chord to that chord. It's not the way you're supposed to do it."
MARIAH CAREY
Larry King Live, Dec. 19, 2002
Music ... is the frozen tapioca in the ice sheet of History.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Conversations with Goethe"
If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
True life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you.
ANN PATCHETT
Bel Canto
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
"I Am in Need of Music"
The music, yearning like a God in pain.
JOHN KEATS
"The Eve of Saint Agnes"
Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
O Music! language of the soul,
Of love, of God to man;
Bright beam from heaven thrilling,
That lightens sorrow's weight.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Apostrophe," Imogen and Other Poems
Music is the universal language of mankind -- poetry their universal pastime and delight.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Outre-Mer
Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music