Song quotes
10.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside song — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We Are All the Same Listen to the reeds as they sway apart; Hear them speak of lost friends. At birth, you were cut from your bed, Crying and grasping in separation. Everyone listens, knowing your song. You yearn for others who know your name, And the words to your lament. We are all the same, all the same, Longing to find our way back; Back to the one, back to the only one."
"Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song."
"His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed —that voice was a deathless song."
"My goal from the very beginning was just to write good songs that don't require any production to be felt or understood. I wanted to be able to sit in a room with a guitar and play the song from beginning to end and have it be as impactful as if you heard the studio version with all the bells and whistles."
"People who listen to them properly don't underestimate them. Unfortunately, there's so much about my career and me that distracts people from the actual content of most of my songs."
"Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale."
"I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time."
"Listen to the song of life."
"Only sing - don't do cheap songs, don't do silly songs, just do, just do wonderful songs that are well-written."
"The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always . . . first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it."
"Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that."
"We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it."
"For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night."
"I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"When you listen to an album, it shouldn't feel like, "That's the girl song," "That's the club song." I shouldn't know what you're thinking while you're making the song. I don't want to know what the artist is thinking."
"By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape."
"Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener."
"Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you."
"We went down [Folsom Prison] and there's a rodeo at all these shows that the prisoners have there. And in between the rodeo things, they asked me to set up and do two or three songs. So that was what I did. I did "Folsom Prison Blues," which they thought was their song - you know? - and "I Walk The Line," "Hey Porter," "Cry, Cry, Cry." And then the word got around on the grapevine that Johnny Cash is all right and that you ought to see him."
"That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech."
