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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"Everything I've ever done is out. I don't have boxes of unreleased stuff. There's nothing in the files. I can never keep anything unless I don't like the sound of it or it didn't work. If I can sing it to an engineer, I can sing it to anyone."
"O, pleasant is the welcome kiss When day's dull round is o'er; And sweet the music of the step That meets us at the door."
"Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street."
"You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival."
"That's what music is: entertainment. The more you put yourself into it, the more of you comes out in it."
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC"
"There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions."
"I've sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you're writing it's very difficult to decide what to reveal."
"If you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth."
"Your life is worth much more than gold."
"The more you accept herb, the more you accept Rastafari."
"I first met Jimmy Page in London in 1961, and he was listening to James Burton, Scotty Moore and Cliff Gallup with Gene Vincent, as was I ... these were the rock and roll guys who really sparked our interest in the guitar, and later we delved into other things and went different directions ... during my time with Eric Clapton, we talked about what we'd listened to early on, and he was a huge fan of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis"
"Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves."
"Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine."
"jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force."
"Back when we were first making records, you didn't just make the music, you put a great deal of energy into the way it looked, and every word that was written on the whole thing."
"I've always felt that rock & roll was very, very wholesome."
"Our mission goes beyond commerce, it goes beyond technology. Our intent is to preserve music's importance in our lives, music is the language of love, of laughter, of heartbreak, of mystery. It's the world's true, true, without question, universal language."
"My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I'm still a virgin in a lot of ways. I'm not used to being shot down for no reason."
"There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do."
