Quotes About Music

Quotes About...Music in General

The universe is more like music than matter.

Donald Andrews

Music is life's only true magic, treat it with all the respect that it deserves.

Bruce Swedien

When you read music, there is a part of your creativity that shuts down. It's like learning to paint with coloring books. It's like coloring within the lines-you don't take off. When you think about it, what music notes or a coloring book does is stifles creativity.

David Lynch

It is the culture-conditioned mind, rather than the ears, that do the listening today.

No music is totally "pure" and the vitality of a tradition can be measured by its ability to integrate new contributions.

If western musicians had to rely on their ears instead of their eyes to create music, where would it be today and in what form?

Within music lies all the wonders and keys to the miracles of life – natural and spiritual. Music can facilitate the process of change and growth.

Ted Andrews

Real music is not for wealth, not for honors or even the joys of the mind…but is a path for realization and salvation.

Ali Akbar Khan

True knowledge of sound carries with it great power. It allows one to travel without moving.

Joska Soos

Never before in the Western world have so many new instruments been devised and constructed as today. Only a few copies of each prototype are made in most cases, and in many instances there is only the original. Musicians make such instruments for themselves--and watch over them like a precious secret. Just as the masters of Asia have done for centuries--however, it is important to stress that the young people who behave similarly in the West are not imitating Asian customs. The initiative was entirely theirs. In that respect too the instruments they build and play are also becoming part of the current of world music.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt

That which cannot be expressed otherwise can only be told through music. A thought, which seems commonplace in its analysis, acquires a deeper sense in music.

Tagore

Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation. Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound.

Kabir

Music has eloquence of expression, greater than any other art.



The art of music is infinite yet complete in itself.

Tansen

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy.

Beethoven

Mathematicians are able to break down into measure and figure what musicians do intuitively.



The art of music is endowed with a supernatural origin and a divine purpose, more so than any other art.

Liebniz

Folk music is the "original melody" of man; it is the "musical mirror" of the world.

Nietzsche

The fact that the "world is sound" isn't just a widespread myth or legend. It is confirmed in the established findings of fundamental harmonic research and many other disciplines. We have found the world's tonal character confirmed in DNA genes and electron spins, in the solar wind and geomagnetism, in the weather and in the "song" of flowers and plants.



Ever since the time of his incarnation, man has progressively lost his original spiritual perception. This has worked to divorce music and language from the natural harmonies and rhythms, which were and remain the primordial condition of all things.

Jocelyn Godwin

The characteristic healing power of music has been increasingly crippled in recent times, so that many have lost the desire even to listen to music, owing to the sheer, strident noise of the era of extreme materialism.

Jocelyn Godwin

It was probably the introduction of tempered tuning in the 18th century that resulted in ever-greater atrophy of awareness of overtones in Western music. That was inevitable because tempered tuning amounts to negation of natural tuning, which is postulated in every single note by way of the accompanying overtone series. It is almost as if a piece played in tempered tuning--and thus virtually all Western music--insists on correcting nature. Not a single note in such a piece is heard in its natural relationships--apart from the octave itself. Man's belief that he can do things better reigns.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt

In Eastern music, rich in overtones, the "system" creates the tones, whereas in Western music it is the notes that establish the system.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Music is the archetype of the cosmic order, and as such the most genuine of a world restored, but this holds true only so long as it has not fallen victim to a chaotic way of thinking.

Jocelyn Godwin

The more richly and consciously a music is endowed with overtones, the more timeless it is. The most timeless music on the planet comes from the great Indian classical tradition, which also disposes over the most differentiated awareness of harmonics.



O music, In your depths we deposit our hearts and souls. Thou hast taught us to see with our ears and hear with our hearts.

Khalil Gibran

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

Martin Luther

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.



Speech is man's most confused and egocentric expression, his most orderly and magnanimous utterance is music.

Ned Rorem

It is music's lofty mission to shed light on the depths of the human heart.

Robert Schumann

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

Leo Tolstoy

Which of these two powers, love or music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? Why separate them? They are the two wings of the soul.

Hector Berlioz

Wouldst thou know if a people be well governed, or if its laws be good or bad, examine the music it practices.

Confucius

As the music is, so are the people of the country.

Turkish proverb

Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness and life to everything. Fine music is the essence of order and leads to all that is just and good, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate and eternal form.

Plato

Music is the soil in that the spirit lives, thinks and invents.

Ludwig von Beethoven

Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you and take some of you with it when it leaves.



See deep enough and you see musically, the heart of nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

Thomas Carlyle

Music can exist only if it reflects the inner life of humanity, not the outer life of its technology.

Alec Wilder

All true and deeply felt music, whether secular or sacred, has its home on the heights where art and religion dwell.

Albert Schweitzer

The rotation of the universe and the motion of the planets could neither begin nor continue without music...for everything is ordered by God according to the laws of harmony.

Plutarch

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Pythagoras

Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love. The deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of the arts.

Will Durant

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

Gustav Mahler

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

Aldous Huxley

Music is the outward and audible signification of inward and spiritual realities.



Music is said to be the speech of angels, in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Thomas Carlyle

Mathematics is music for the mind; music is mathematics for the soul.