Quotes and passages on music

Without music, life
would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away. John Cage

Music is the basis of the whole creation. In reality the whole of creation is music, and what we call music is simply a miniature of the original music, which is creation itself, expressed in tone and rhythm. Hazrat Inayat Khan No soul comes on earth without a feeling for music. It is only when souls have become dense after having come to the earth that they lose that feeling. But when someone has lost interest in music one should know that person is not living; there is something that was living in that person that is now dead.

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail. All exquisite niceties of weights and measures as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful. Edith Hamilton

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. Albert Einstein

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded
by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets--it
is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the
baritone singer singing his sweet romanza--nor that of the
women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they.

Walt Whitman
"A Song for Occupations"

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Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space
between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Maya Angelou

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching
violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence
will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--
literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and
rejection and pain and misery and loss.

Nick Hornby
High Fidelity

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley
Music at Night and Other Essays

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Kurt Vonnegut

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping
of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Aaron Copland

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.

Plato

The only truth is music.

Jack Kerouac

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Leopold Stokowski

art

One should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and
see a fine picture every day of one's life, in order that
worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the
beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who
differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

Sarah Dessen
Just Listen

Music is the universal language of mankind.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret
of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

Khalil Gibran

People profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give
no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

Henry David Thoreau

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter--to all these music gives voice,
but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest
to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were
sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods
and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.

Albert Schweitzer

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

Confucius

Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character
and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow,
will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger
than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds
you together when nothing else can.

Jennifer Donnelly
Revolution

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Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger;
and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort
in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes
through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?

Orson Scott Card

art

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.

Henry David Thoreau

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear
and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

To sing is to love and affirm, to fly and soar, to coast into the
hearts of the people who listen, to tell them that life is to live,
that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty
exists, and must be hunted for and found.

Joan Baez

I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my hear I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

William Wordsworth

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have
language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness,
and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" of nature
as I can guess at. And finally, perhaps best of all, we have music.

Lewis Thomas

They knew I was serious about my music. Succeeding at it was a normal,
natural event. I felt no pressure because I knew my direction and the family
simply let it lead me. Glamor, exploitation, special attention were out; work
was in. Brilliant-Liven and her husband were extremely disciplinary and
extremely serious-minded musicians; they never let me forget my purpose.
The whole idea was that, as a musician, you just devote all your energies
to your work. I had to be a serious student of music, or none at all.

Rosalyn Tureck

Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to
play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet.
Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in
time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's
first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or
at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the
experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that
melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early
on tends to stay with us all our lives.

Fred Rogers
The World According to Mr. Rogers

Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions
voice, language, and form, so it can be recognized and shared.

Brené Brown
Braving the Wilderness