Piano quotes
799 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside piano — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'"
"You can't be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I'm very thankful for that. I'm very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened."
"Well I like everything but my first love has always been piano because when I started out there was a piano in my house and it was there so I just started tinkling on it really so it's always been my first love."
"Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I'm invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who'll play the piano after dinner, and I know you're not really invited for yourself. You're just an ornament."
"My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country."
"Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano."
"I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me."
"God didn't give me the ability to play the piano, or paint a picture or have compassion. But... he did give me the ability to crack a walnut with my hoo-ha."
"First of all, I swore it was two people playing. When I finally admitted to myself that was one man, I gave up the piano for a month. I figured it was hopeless to practice."
"Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled."
"Everybody in my neighborhood in the '40s, they played pianos. That's how people partied. They didn't try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I've been around a lot of piano all my life."
"I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life."
"It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear."
"If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot."
"Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure conciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form."
"Quoting Demosthenes, 'For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.' I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding."
"The piano has been drinking, not me."
"When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!"
"I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth."
"Truly to sing, that is a different breath."
