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.
Charles Darwin
Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.
Billy Joel
I let my music take me where my heart wants to go.
Cat Stevens
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere, but so is AIDS.
Malcolm Williamson
The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
Van Morrison
You've got to care about the music...You'd better not be doing it for the publicity, the fame or the money. And you'd sure better not be doing it because it's a way to make a living, 'cause that ain't always going to be easy. You got to believe it, believe in the music. You got to mean it.
Waylon Jennings
It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.
Frédéric Chopin
I hope my music can help many nations all over the world see that the true things come out of the earth, and then they go back into the earth. But the true love you have to find within yourself and learn to respect one another from nation to nation.
Charles Bradley
A popular song is one that makes us all think we can sing.
Andy Williams
Music's been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal.
Ray Charles
Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.
Jeffrey Tate
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
Charlie Trotter
Traveling with a big band is like being an inmate in a traveling zoo.
Hoagy Carmichael
Complete strangers can stand silent next to each other in an elevator and not even look each other in the eye. But at a concert, those same strangers could find themselves dancing and singing together like best friends. That's the power of music.
LZ Granderson
'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.
Artie Shaw
They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Charles Mingus
People don't slip. Time catches up with them.
Nat King Cole
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.
Louis Armstrong
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
Michel de Montaigne
Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.
Bob Dylan
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky
The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac
Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders.
Pete Seeger
Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?'
Artie Shaw
When you sing, always tell the truth.
Billie Holiday
Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
Van Morrison
Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.
Chet Atkins
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.
Robert Green Ingersoll
There is no such thing as a wrong note.
Art Tatum
I wouldn't even think of playing music if I was born in these times. I wouldn't even listen to the radio.
Bob Dylan
Any good music must be an innovation.
Les Baxter
Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Hans Christian Andersen
It isn't true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times if you know how.
Bobby Darin
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.
Leonard Cohen
Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
George Carlin
I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying ‘I don’t want to make a cemetery of your compositions.’
Hugo Wolf
Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician’s curse.
Patrick Rothfuss
We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
Louis Armstrong
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
Most people are satisfied with the junk food being sold as music.
Billy Joel
In terms of helping people understand and know each other a little better, music is universal - universal and transporting.
Aretha Franklin
It's not what you play, it's how you play it.
Mary Lou Williams
The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth.
Andres Segovia
You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.
Van Morrison
If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.
Billy Joel
Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.
Karl Kraus
Life is a lot like jazz ... Its best when you improvise.
George Gershwin
My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.
Bob Dylan
There's nothing better than live music. It's raw energy, and raw energy feeds the soul.
Dhani Jones
I'll keep singing 'till I die.
Bing Crosby
I think if you have a passion for what you do then there are no limitations on how long or how much you can accomplish.
Tony Bennett
Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.
Frank Zappa
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Louis Armstrong
Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.
Paul Simon
I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.
Paul Desmond
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.
Thomas Beecham
All I needed to do was sing with conviction, speaking my truth from the heart, honestly and straightforwardly, and to offer my words, ideas and music to the audience as if it were one collective friend that I'd known for a very long time.
Carole King
Don't cheat yourself out of music. Music is one thing. The music business is another thing. Save enough of yourself to keep living anyway. Save enough joy in your heart to enjoy it. Let your reward be in the doing of it.
Bill Withers
That's because we did not set out to make black music. We set out to make quality music that everyone could enjoy and listen to.
Smokey Robinson
Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The more you live, the less you die.
Janis Joplin
If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it … all you need is a beat.
Artie Shaw
I don't just write music to aesthetically satisfy somebody. The reason I write music is that I feel it's a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.
George Russell
If the music is too loud – you’re too old!
Unknown
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
Gottfried Leibniz
Money doesn’t talk, it swears.
Bob Dylan
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Leonard Bernstein
I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?
Victor Borge
This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.
Bob Dylan
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
Oscar Peterson
It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.
Ella Fitzgerald
Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.
George Bernard Shaw
Music is the tool to express life - and all that makes a difference.
Herbie Hancock
Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.
Thomas Beecham
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
A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman
I remember Mitch Miller saying every week, This rock and roll stuff will never last. But one doesn't like to bring that up to Mitch.
Rosemary Clooney
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.
Mark Twain
To me, the art of music is magnificent, and I cannot bear to see it treated in a shabby way.
Maria Callas
Guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of 'Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time' ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear.
Joe Satriani
People haven’t always been there for me but music always has.
Taylor Swift
Music is an expression of individuality; it's how you see the world. All art is, for that matter. You take how you experience the world, interpret it, and send it out there - express it - whether it's sculpture, dance or singing.
David Sanborn
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.
Bryce Anderson
Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.
Alistair Cooke
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.
Clark Terry
The bass, no matter what kind of music you're playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.
Charlie Haden
What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong
Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.
Sonny Rollins
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it.
Thomas Beecham
Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.
Elton John
Tell me what you listen to, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
Sydney Smith
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Kin Hubbard
Country music is three chords and the truth.
Harlan Howard
You'll never learn to bounce in jazz if you don't know your Bach and Beethoven.
Paul Whiteman
The only love affair I have ever had was with music.
Maurice Ravel
You blows who you is.
Louis Armstrong
Music is the emotional life of most people.
Leonard Cohen
If you play a tune and a person don't tap their feet, don't play the tune.
Count Basie
Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.
Paul Whiteman
I was listening to music long before rock 'n roll.
Bill Wyman
There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.
Thelonious Monk
If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.
Oscar Wilde
Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.
Emory Austin
Music should never be harmless.
Robbie Robertson
Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged.
Billy Joel
It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.
Quincy Jones
Music is the soundtrack of your life.
Dick Clark
I never wanted to set the world on fire. So I never had to burn any bridges behind me.
Dinah Shore
Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.
John Coltrane
Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.
Lou Rawls
My voice is small but disagreeable.
George Gershwin
Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world.
Giuseppe Mazzini
You can't stay in your home town and play because the two people will get tired of seeing you.
Janis Joplin
When you play, never mind who listens to you.
Robert Schumann
I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself.
Bob Dylan
If you want to please the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.
Arturo Toscanini
Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.
Alan Moore
Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.
Sid Caesar
Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, look out!
Bob Dylan
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Noel Coward
My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.
Liberace
Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there’s no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.
Jerry Seinfeld
All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
Frank Zappa
There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.
Robert Browning
A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.
Glenn Miller
Nobody can hear you read music.
Erroll Garner
If you are creative, you get busier as you get older.
Tony Bennett
I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
Charles Mingus
I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.
Oscar Peterson
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.
Aristotle
When we are touched by a song, it is because the artist cannot hide himself.
Leonard Cohen
Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Singing is just a feeling set to music.
Carrie Underwood
I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.
Ella Fitzgerald
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
Henry Miller
I don't make a particular distinction between 'high art' and 'low art.' Music is there for everybody. It's a river we can all put our cups into and drink it and be sustained by it.
John Williams
I’m finally old enough to say I despise today’s music.
Unknown
Youth has everything - everything but experience and tolerance.
Patti Page
The Creator wants us to drum. He wants us to corrupt the world with drum, dance and chants. After all, we have already corrupted the world with power and greed....which hasn't gotten us anywhere - now's the time to corrupt the world with drum, dance and chants.
Babatunde Olatunji
Music was my joy, my home, the one place I felt happy and secure.
Lawrence Welk
I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating.
Count Basie
For me, music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.
Luciano Pavarotti
Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
Billy Gibbons
Wait a minute, maybe I can do anything.
Janis Joplin
I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody... Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there.
Sonny Criss
Making the simple complicated is commonplace: Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus
Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.
Nat King Cole
You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.
Arthur Rubenstein
People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.
Cab Calloway
Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong
I just do what I do. I like to make music
Neil Young
Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.
Art Blakey
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
Stephen Leacock
Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.
Henri Rabaud
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
Duke Ellington
You can cage the singer but not the song.
Harry Belafonte
Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets to the kids – they're starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners.
Alan Freed
I didn't get interested in music. It was a gift from God.
Nina Simone
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Laozi
To play without passion is inexcusable!
Ludwig van Beethoven
As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.
Charlie Haden
I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can't define it beyond that.
Count Basie
Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.
Willie Nelson
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.
Harold C. Schonberg
Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.
Stevie Wonder
Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.
Paul Whiteman
There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.
Dave Brubeck
We came out right in the middle of the hard-rock period... it was hard-rock everywhere! But we were ready to make our music, you know? And it was such a turn around, I guess it caught people by surprise.
Karen Carpenter
If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.
Bootsy Collins
It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.
Albert Einstein
Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.
Dave Brubeck
It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!
Thelonious Monk
Everybody wants to know about my style and how it came about. It's no big secret. It's the way I feel.
Ella Fitzgerald
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Nina Simone
When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.
Carla Bley
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
Plato
Make it simple to last your whole life long. Don't worry that it's not enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing, sing a song
Karen Carpenter
Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I'm honest
Frank Sinatra
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
Thelonious Monk
The end of all good music is to affect the soul.
Claudio Monteverdi
Jazz never ends... it just continues.
Sonny Rollins
Music is my religion.
Jimi Hendrix
Play it fuckin’ loud!
Bob Dylan
Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili.
Harry James
Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.
Benjamin Disraeli
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
Plato
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
Igor Stravinsky
Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.
Lester Bowie
We might as well swing boys, because Stravinsky cuts us all.
Woody Herman
Art was not created as a way to riches. Strive to become a true artist; all else will take care of itself.
Robert Schumann
I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.
Charles Darwin
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.
Thelonious Monk
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.
Billy Joel
If you want to know whether you have written anything worth preserving, sing it to yourself without any accompaniment.
Joseph Haydn
As some to Church repair, not for the doctrine, but the music there.
Alexander Pope
I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
Duke Ellington
If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
Claude Debussy
When rock came along the lyrics and melodies became less important and it bothered me to think that perhaps they might not regain the value they have to music - they are music.
Dinah Shore
I just want to feel as much as I can, it's what soul is all about.
Janis Joplin
Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.
George Gershwin
The world’s most famous and popular language is music.
Psy
Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.
Dave Matthews
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.
Thelonious Monk
The guitar is the easiest instrument to play and the hardest to play well.
Andres Segovia
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.
Bob Dylan
Never play anything the same way twice.
Louis Armstrong
I'm one of those regular weird people.
Janis Joplin
Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.
Napoleon Bonaparte
That I can't relate to today's music or morals doesn't make either necessarily bad. Just different. I leave the judgements to others.
Perry Como
No matter how great a man is, the size of his funeral usually depends on the weather.
Rosemary Clooney
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.
Mark Twain
If I could have any job in the world, I'd start out by writing a blog on Wired.com.
Bob Dylan
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
John Lithgow
I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.
Billie Holiday
I'll keep working as long as I live because singing has taken on the feeling of joy that I had when I started, when my only responsibility was to sing well.
Rosemary Clooney
An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.
Artie Shaw
I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.
Bing Crosby
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W.H. Auden
Music is there to get you through life's ups and downs, good times and not so good times.
Rob Halford
Passion is a young man's game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise.
Bob Dylan
If it doesn't come from your heart, music just doesn't work.
Levon Helm
Music comes to me more readily than words.
Ludwig van Beethoven
You can’t beat The Beatles, you join ‘em.
Peggy Lee
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.
Cecil Taylor
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.
Duke Ellington
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylan
How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?
Jane Swan
All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.
Sonny Rollins
There's something missing in the music industry today... and it's music. Songs you hear don't last, it's just product fed to you by the industry.
Jimmy Buffett
If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.
Confucius
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
Kurt Vonnegut
If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.
Shinichi Suzuki
To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.
Robert Schumann
The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.
Billie Holiday
It takes the black keys and the white keys both, to make perfect harmony.
Benny Goodman
It may be that that we can sing what we often cannot say, whether it be from shyness, fear, lack of the right words or the passion or dramatic gift to express them. More souls have rallied to more causes by the strains of music than by straining rhetoric.
Richard Rodgers
Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
Duke Ellington
All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.
Dave Barry
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.
Artie Shaw
Jazz isn't what you do; it's how you do it.
Fats Waller
Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.
Lionel Hampton
Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.
E.Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg
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
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
George Eliot
My mother has always been unhappy with what I do. She would rather I do something nicer, like bricklaying.
Mick Jagger
There's a lot of different forms of communication, but music is absolutely the purest one.
Duane Allman
The older I get, the surer I am that I'm not running the show.
Leonard Cohen
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
Ludwig van Beethoven
People who have memorized your songs-how can you not love them?
Todd Rundgren
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pablo Picasso
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.
John Coltrane
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy
There’s nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn’t exist before – I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.
Paul McCartney
Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?
Bob Dylan
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
Albert Einstein
Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so.
B.B.King
Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.
Jelly Roll Morton
Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.
John Lennon
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Miles Davis
If a guy's got it, let him give it. I'm selling music, not prejudice.
Benny Goodman
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.
Bob Dylan
People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.
John Lennon
Those with prodigious skill in music are better suited for all things.
Martin Luther
Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.
Jelly Roll Morton
All music is beautiful.
Billy Strayhorn
The harmonica is the world's best-selling musical instrument. You're welcome.
Bob Dylan
I wish you wouldn't make the strings such an important part of your arrangements because frankly they're only a tax dodge!
Tommy Dorsey
If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
Louis Armstrong
Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
Kurt Vonnegut
Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing - if I respect the song. If I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.
Frank Sinatra
Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.
Mary Lou Williams
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
Thelonious Monk
Jazz music is the power of now.
Wynton Marsalis
In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.
Robert Schumann
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.
Pete Seeger
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.
Elvis Costello
Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.
Dizzy Gillespie
You are what you settle for.
Janis Joplin
The thing that I always notice that dates a record is the rhythm section. With a good arranger the music can be timeless. But, rhythm can change, because heaven knows, we didn't know rock was going to come in, did we?
Peggy Lee
Love is friendship set to music.
Jackson Pollock
Music enriches people’s lives in the same way paintings and literature do. Everybody deserves that.
Victoria Wood
It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.
Duke Ellington
Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.
Miles Davis
Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.
John Philip Sousa
In memory, everything seems to happen to music.
Tennessee Williams
You take romance - I'll take Jell-O.
Ella Fitzgerald
Jazz is like wine. When it is new it's only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.
Steve Lacy
I am tired before the concert, not afterward.
Arthur Rubenstein
Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.
Maria von Trapp
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland
Music to me is like breathing – I don’t get tired of breathing, I don’t get tired of music.
Ray Charles
When I was a little boy, I told my dad, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a musician.’ My dad said: ‘You can’t do both, Son’.
Chet Atkins
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!
Art Tatum
If the King loves music, it is well with the land.
Mencius
Like sunshine, music is a powerful force that can instantly and almost chemically change your entire mood.
Michael Franti
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
Confucius
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing.
Peggy Lee
Bing Crosby sings like all people think they sing in the shower.
Dinah Shore
Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.
Pete Seeger
Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.
Doris Day
I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
Oscar Levant
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green