MUSIC QUOTES III

quotations about music

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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

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Music is a language lovers understand
Melody and romance wander hand in hand
Cupid never fails assisted by a band
So if you have something sweet to tell her
Say it with music

IRVING BERLIN

Tags: Irving Berlin

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The music, yearning like a God in pain.

JOHN KEATS

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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

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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

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Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

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Music is another lady that talks charmingly and says nothing.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

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The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental--that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.

ADAM PHILLIPS

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Who first said that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, I know not; but that it is true, I am sure. Who has not felt the melting power of music, and stopped to listen to the sweet strains of some simple melody which has brought, or nearly brought, tears to his eyes? Where is the breat that has not been stirred by the cathedral organ, and choristers echoing their sacred strains through the aisles and corridors, and dying away, as it were, in heaven above? Will not the sweet but simple ballad of "Home, Sweet Home," when sung in a foreign land, wake memories from the dead, and melt the hardest heart; rouse every grand, noble, unselfish, and patriotic feeling in the breast, and carry the hearer thousands of miles across the storm-tossed oceans and seas that separate him from his own beloved country, the dwelling place of those near and dear to him, the model land of his heart, the resting place of his sires, his adored and honored fatherland.

T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH

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

JOSEPH ADDISON

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When time itself shall be no more / And all things in confusion hurl'd / Music shall then exert it's power / And sound survive the ruins of the world / Then saints and angels shall agree / In one eternal jubilee / All Heaven shall echo with their hymns divine / And God himself with pleasure see / The whole creation in a chorus join.

JOSEPH ADDISON

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Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

HERBERT SPENCER

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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

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Music recalls a state of feeling, and not merely a series of incidents. When we listen to the long-forgotten melody, we do not review the scenes and actions of our childhood in succession, but we become for the moment children once again.

ARTHUR HELPS

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Everything is music for the born musician.

ROMAIN ROLLAND

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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

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Music is organized sound, but the organization has to involve some element of the unexpected or it is emotionally flat and robotic. The appreciation we have for music is intimately related to our ability to learn the underlying structure of music we like--the equivalent to grammar in spoken or signed languages--and to be able to make predictions about what will come next. Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won't. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music.

DANIEL J. LEVITIN

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Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

JOHN MILTON

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Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ

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Music ... is the frozen tapioca in the ice sheet of History.

DONALD BARTHELME

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