Music quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside music — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I don't bother so much about the others' songs. For instance, I don't give a damn about how 'Something' is doing in the charts - I watch 'Come Together' (the flip side) because that's my song."
"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."
"We must use time creatively."
"After theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor."
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played"
"I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic."
"Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then."
"It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played."
"He was Jimi Hendrix! He didn't sound like anybody else but himself. He was like Charlie Parker in his way of playing, he played well, he was a person that made waves. When you heard Jimi Hendrix you knew it was Jimi Hendrix, he introduced himself in his instrument... You know, many radio stations play records and a lot of the times they don't call out the names who you just listened to, but when they play Jimi Hendrix, you don't have to tell me, [you know] it's Jimi Hendrix."
"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them."
"I am the first instrument. I am the voice. I do not imitate other instruments. Other instruments imitate me."
"Have you ever heard somebody sing some lyrics that you've never sung before, and you realize you've never sung the right words in that song? You hear them and all of a sudden you say to yourself, 'Life in the Fast Lane?' That's what they're saying right there? You think, 'why have I been singing 'wipe in the vaseline?' how many people have heard me sing 'wipe in the vaseline?' I am an idiot."
"I learned very early in life that: 'Without a song, the day would never end; without a friend, a man ain't got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend-without a song.' So I keep singing a song."
"I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician."
"Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz."
"Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead."
"..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail"
"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas."
"Alcohol make you drunk, man. It don't make you meditate, it just make you drunk. Herb is more a consciousness."
"With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note."
