MUSIC QUOTES III

quotations about music

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Words must ever sound so feeble in attempting to express the magic power of melody.

ARTHUR HELPS

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Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

HERBERT SPENCER

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Music is another lady that talks charmingly and says nothing.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

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The passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

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The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental--that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.

ADAM PHILLIPS

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Music is the link between earth and heaven.

LEWIS F. KORNS

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Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

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Music is a language lovers understand
Melody and romance wander hand in hand
Cupid never fails assisted by a band
So if you have something sweet to tell her
Say it with music

IRVING BERLIN

Tags: Irving Berlin

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Toyish airs please trivial ears.

FRANCIS QUARLES

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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

JEAN COCTEAU

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Music recalls a state of feeling, and not merely a series of incidents. When we listen to the long-forgotten melody, we do not review the scenes and actions of our childhood in succession, but we become for the moment children once again.

ARTHUR HELPS

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Hark to the music! How beneath the strain
Of reckless revelry, vibrates and sobs
One fundamental chord of constant pain,
The pulse-beat of the poet's heart that throbs.

EMMA LAZARUS

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Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person.

SARAH DESSEN

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Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ

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Every man is full of music; but it is not every man that knows how to bring it out.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

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Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa-- Who knows most, knows least.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

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What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

KEN LIVINGSTONE

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I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

ELIZABETH BISHOP

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O Music! language of the soul,
Of love, of God to man;
Bright beam from heaven thrilling,
That lightens sorrow's weight.

WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE

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Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.

LUCIANO BERIO

Tags: Luciano Berio

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