There’s nothing quite like music to give you the feels! Music unites cultures, creating social cohesion. It transcends language, geography, religion, and cultural barriers. No matter where you go in the world, music is understood.
I remember when I was traveling through Europe a few years ago – it was when the Spanish song Despacito was at the height of its popularity. Although I didn’t understand the words, the song captured my heart, with its beautiful rhythm and melody. Interestingly enough, I heard the song played in every European country that I visited, although Spanish wasn’t spoken in any of those countries. In Venice, an old busker played Despacito on the violin, in the Piazza San Marco. Music is, indeed, powerful!
But music does more than this. Studies have shown that it can improve your well-being, by reducing stress and possibly even lowering blood pressure. In an instant, music can take you back to times past, bringing back memories and evoking nostalgia. Isn’t that why we have songs that are the soundtrack to certain chapters in our lives?
If you love music as much as we do, then this collection of quotes will bring out your love of music even more! These quotes highlight just how wonderful, powerful, and empowering, music can be.
Short Music Quotes
“Where words fail, music speaks.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Where words leave off, music begins.”
Heinrich Heine
“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”
Kahlil Gibran
“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”
Edward Bulwer Lytton
“There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.”
William P. Merrill
“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.”
Robert Fripp
“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
Confucius
“Good music does not have an expiration date.”
Unknown
“Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.”
Kin Hubbard
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
Maya Angelou
“Beethoven’s last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.”
Thomas Beecham
“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.”
John Erskine
“Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.”
John Paul Friedrich Richter
“In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.”
Robert Schumann
“If music is a place — then jazz is the city, folk is the wilderness, rock is the road, classical is a temple.”
Vera Nazarin
“Love is friendship set to music.”
Jackson Pollock
“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
Alphonse de Lamartine
“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.”
Oscar Wilde
“Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.”
Thomas Fuller
“Where words fail, music speaks.”
Hans Christian Anderson
“Without music, life would be a blank to me.”
Jane Austen
“Philosophy is the highest music.”
Plato
“Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
Leonard Bernstein
“Music gives color to the air of the moment.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“Some people have lives; some people have music.”
John Green
“Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.”
Johnny Depp
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Country music is three chords and the truth.”
Harlan Howard
Funny Music Quotes
“The piano has been drinking, not me.”
Tom Waits
“Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.”
Frank Zappa
“If everybody was happy in a relationship there wouldn’t be any good music.”
Unknown
“Life without music is like Facebook without notifications.”
Unknown
“Competitions are for horses, not artists.”
Bela Bartok
“Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. There’ll always be some arrogant little brat who wants to make music with a guitar.”
Dave Edmunds
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”
Mark Twain
“My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.”
Cole Porter
“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.”
Victor Hugo
“I smash guitars because I like them.”
Pete Townshend
“If I knew I had to play this song the rest of my life, I probably woulda wrote something else.”
Joe Walsh
“When people say you’re doing something radical in rock or dance music, I’m not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It’s like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.”
Jonny Greenwood
“To get your playing more forceful, hit the drums harder.”
Keith Moon
“Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.”
Jean Paul
“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”
Igor Stravinsky
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
Steve Martin
“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”
Igor Stravinsky
“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”
Louis Armstrong
“I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.”
Elton John
“Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere, but so is AIDS.”
Malcolm Williamson
“It’s not that I am ignoring you, it’s just that this is a really good song.”
Unknown
“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.”
Igor Stravinsky
“When an instrument fails on stage it mocks you and must be destroyed!”
Trent Reznor
“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?”
John Cusack
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.”
Bill Cosby
“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.”
Thomas Beecham
“Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.”
Jelly Roll Morton
“I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.”
Jimi Hendrix
“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion but doesn’t.”
Tom Waits
“I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.”
Ella Fitzgerald
“I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.”
Duke Ellington
“It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.”
Johann Sebastian Bach
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“In the end we’re all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven’t been on the show.”
Marilyn Manson
“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”
Frank Zappa
“Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.”
John Philip Sousa
“We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.”
Mark Twain
“We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.”
Dave Berry
“I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying ‘I don’t want to make a cemetery of your compositions’.”
Hugo Wolf
“The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it’s probably a good thing. We don’t need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.”
Andy Rooney
“Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.”
Oscar Wilde
“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”
William F. Buckley, Jr.
“The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.”
Erik Satie
“My music is best understood by children and animals.”
Igor Stravinsky
“I never practice my guitar… from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.”
Wes Montgomery
“In fact, I hope somebody does this to all my rubbish demos when I’m dead, making them into hit songs.”
George Harrison
“I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.”
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
“If you’re listening to a rock star to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are.”
Alice Cooper
Music Quotes About Life
“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”
Kahlil Gibran
“Similar to books, music can influence our life in a positive or negative way.”
Catherine Pulsifer
“If everyone started off the day singing, just think how happy they’d be.”
Lauren Myracle
“Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”
Haruki Murakami
“There is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.”
Edward Elgar
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”
Plato
“Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“When we sing, our neurotransmitters connect in new and different ways, releasing endorphins that make us smarter, healthier, happier, and more creative. And when we do this with other people, the effect is amplified.”
Tania De Jong
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Aldous Huxley
“Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”
Ludwig van Beethoven
“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
Berthold Auerbach
“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
Charlie Parker
“Music is the only thing I’ve ever known that doesn’t have any rules at all.”
Josh Homme
“Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.”
Baruch Spinoza
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
“The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.”
Pete Seeger
“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.”
Albert Schweitzer
“When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”
Alan Watts
“We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters.”
Eddie Van Halen
“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.”
Louis Armstrong
“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
Leopold Stokowski
“Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it’s not OK, but you can change it.”
Bono
“The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.”
Bruce Springsteen
“Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.”
Billy Joel
“Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.”
George Gershwin
“I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.”
Ludwig van Beethoven
“There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.”
Franz Joseph Haydn
“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”
Claude Debussy
“I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.”
James Taylor
“Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape.”
Shania Twain
“Music is my religion.”
Jimi Hendrix
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”
Gustav Mahler
“People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.”
Michael Jackson
Power of Music Quotes
“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
Langston Hughes
“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song
“Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch.”
Debasish Mridha
“The power of music makes all the difference to me with motivation throughout the day.”
Paul Brodie
“The idea of music having a use goes back centuries. The beginnings of written-down music was the liturgy, and obviously that has a connection with the idea of a meditative state and all of that. So, music can really be useful in that way.”
Max Richter
“Music has the power to heal, transform and inspire, and we have the power through deep listening to increase our intuition and self-awareness.”
Andre Feriante
“Music is a great healer. Begin and end your day with music.”
Lailah Gifty Akita
“Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below.”
John Addison
“One good thing about music is that when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Bob Marley
“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.”
Keith Richards
“Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.”
Paul Simon
“Music is to me like breathing. I don’t get tired of breathing, I don’t get tire of music!”
Ray Charles
“How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?”
Jane Swan
“A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”
Guy de Maupassant
“Music – not just the lyrics, but the music itself – expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.”
Sarah Churchwell
“I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments.”
John Barrowman
“Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.”
Sarah Dessen
“Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.”
Maria von Trapp
“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”
Marcel Marceau
“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
“Music – that’s been my education. There’s not a day that goes by that I take it for granted.”
Billie Joe Armstrong
“I’ve always said music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think.”
Kenny Rogers
“Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.”
Ludwig van Beethoven
“I think music in itself is healing. It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we’re from, everyone loves music.”
Billy Joel
“Music – what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!”
Maria von Trapp
“Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.”
Jason Mraz
“Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.”
Ray Charles
Relaxing Music Quotes
“Listening to music has a positive impact on our health, by helping us recover faster when we experience stress and through the reduction of stress hormone cortisol, to help us achieve a calm state or homeostasis.”
Alex Doman
“I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.”
Bryce W. Anderson
“Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.”
Robert G. Ingersoll
“My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.”
Martin Luther
“There are many ways to relax. Sometimes you might enhance that relaxation by listening to mellow music. At other times, you might use the stress and sing and dance to an upbeat tune.”
Jay Winner
“This is a known fact, when we listen to good and soothing music our brain responds to every task we perform. It calms down our brain and provides healthy effect in our life.”
Mat Fox
“I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.”
William James
“Music can have a profound effect on mood, including confidence level or how relaxed you are.”
Corrina Thurston
“Words make you think a thought, music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.”
E.Y. Harburg
“Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.”
Pablo Casals
“Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing.”
Rebbe Nachman
“Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”
Emory Austin
“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
W.H. Auden
“The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.”
Roy Ayers
“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”
Aaron Copland
“To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?”
Michael Jackson
“Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.”
Thomas Merton
“For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.”
Eric Clapton
“Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn’t.”
Gene Simmons
“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wrapping Up
We hope you enjoyed this collection of quotes about music as much as we have. They emphasize all the things that we love about music and why music is really just so awesome!
If you enjoyed this collection, check out our quotes on art. You might love that too!
