Music

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out. - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. - Mark Twain

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  - Red Auerbach

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.  - Sir Thomas Beecham

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.  - James Brown

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

It's the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love, 'till we find our place, on the path unwinding.  - Elton John, The Lion King Soundtrack

I took my lyre and said: come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument.  - Sappho

Architecture is frozen music. - Goethe

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats. - Albert Schweitzer

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.  - James Crook

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both. - Henri Frederic Amiel

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore. - Jacques Attali

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth. - Ludwig Van Beethoven

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony. - Benjamin Britten

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says "I want to do this song of yours" because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after. - Mary Chapin Carpenter

Without music, life is a journey through a desert. - Pat Conroy

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. - Noel Coward

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism. - Howard Dietz

The high note is not the only thing. - Placido Domingo

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music. - Aretha Franklin

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music. - Billy Joel

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics. - James Weldon Johnson

Music is the vernacular of the human soul. - Geoffrey Latham

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind. - Hal A. Lingerman

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics. - Pietro Mascagni

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. - Theodore Mungers

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out. - Ernest Newman

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. - Simon Rattle

Music should never be harmless. - Robbie Robertson

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music. - Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

A good composer does not imitate; he steals. - Igor Stravinsky

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet. - Jeffrey Tate

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it. - James Taylor

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains. - Paul Whiteman

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!  - Yoko Ono

Music is the only language in which you can not say a mean or sarcastic thing.  - Lord Erskine

Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac. - Madonna

The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches, leaves, and finally blossoms.  - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

All God's Chillun got Rhythm. - Gus Kahn

We are the music makers, We are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams- World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams; We are the movers and shakers Of the world forever, it seems. - Arthur O'Shaunghessy

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it? - Nina Simone

It's time to take a look at my failures and stop calling them successes. Now I can start working at something that can use me best. - Nina Simone

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things -- all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play. - Nina Simone

Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was. - Nina Simone

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing. - Nina Simone

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears. - Paul Simon

Love or music- which power can uplift man to the sublimest heights? It is a large question; yet it seems to me one should answer it in this way: Love cannot give an idea of music; music can give an idea of love. But why seperate them? They are the two wings of the soul.  - Hector Berlioz

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles. - Igor Stravinsky