Quotes About Music

62 quotes

Agatha Christie gave a character the plainest tribute to music: his flute is his oldest companion, and when everything else fails, music remains. Mark Twain described its power more extravagantly, as a magician who lifts his wand and makes all things real pass away. Kafka asked whether a man could be a beast if music could move him so.

Michael Jackson heard music as a property of life itself, writing that everything living has a rhythm, starting with the blood dancing in the veins. J.R.R. Tolkien made it the origin of a world, a song made visible and seen as a light in the darkness. Ronald Reagan called life one grand sweet song. Marcel Proust's remark is the driest of all: we needed Germans in Paris to hear Wagner.
English playwright and poet

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

— Hamlet

Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

— The Importance of Being Earnest

English author

Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!

— Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

. . .where there is no more hope, song remains.

— Les Misérables

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?

— Man and Superman

English writer and philologist

In this Music [the singing of the angels in harmony] the World was begun; for Iluvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness.

— The Silmarillion

Greek philosopher

With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.

— The Nicomachean Ethics

Colombian writer and Nobel laureate

I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.

— Love in the Time of Cholera

5th-century BCE Chinese philosopher and politician

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

— The Book of Rites

French novelist

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

— Madame Bovary

American singer-songwriter

We were both young when I first saw you. I close my eyes and the flashback starts. I'm standin' there on a balcony in summer air.

— Taylor Swift - Fearless: Easy Guitar with Notes & Tab

English philosopher and statesman

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

— The Advancement Of Learning

American singer-songwriter

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

— Chronicles, Vol. 1

English naturalist and biologist

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

British musician

The sun is up, the sky is blue / It's beautiful, and so are you

— Beatles Lyrics

American singer-songwriter and actress

Well my music was different in high school; I was singing about love—you know, things I don't care about anymore.

German poet, writer and literary critic

The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.

American rapper, record producer and actor

I don't do 'black music,' I don't do 'white music'...I make fight music, for high school kids.

American singer, songwriter, record producer, and dancer

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?