 |
 | ""I don"t", she added, "know anything about music, really. But I know
what I like"." | |
 |
Sir Max Beerbohm
|
|
| "A player does not have to like a manager and he does not have to
respect a manager. All he has to do is obey the rules." | |
|
Sparky Anderson
|
|
| "A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a
poet in words, a musician by sounds." | |
|
Henry Moore
|
|
| "After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the
inexpressible is music." | |
|
Aldous Huxley
|
|
| "All music jars when the soul"s out of tune." | |
|
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
|
|
| "Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style
transmits its music only." | |
|
Andre Malraux
|
|
| "And so no force, however great, Can stretch a cord, however fine,
Into a horizontal line That shall be absolutely straight. Quoted as an
example of accidental metre and rhyme." | |
|
William Whewell
|
|
| "Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." | |
|
Francois Voltaire
|
|
| "Brass bands are all very well in their place ? outdoors and several
miles away." | |
|
Sir Thomas Beecham
|
|
| "Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a
tune." | |
|
Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard
|
|
| "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." | |
|
Sir Noµl Pierce Coward
|
|
| "For changing peoples" manners and altering their customs there is
nothing better than music." | |
|
Shu Ching
|
|
| "Give me a laundry list and I"ll set it to music." | |
|
Gioacchini Antonio Rossini
|
|
| "He has Van Gogh"s ear for music." | |
|
Orson Welles
|
|
| "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and
let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of
heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold; There"s not the
smallest orb which thou behold"st But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal
souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we
cannot hear it." | |
|
William Shakespeare
|
|
| "I am amazed at radio DJ"s today. I am firmly convinced that AM on my
radio stands for Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM
stands for." | |
|
Jasper Carrott
|
|
| "I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but
in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young,
young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true. At a
concert he played when he was 95." | |
|
Pablo Casals
|
|
| "I can"t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to
conquer Poland." | |
|
Unknown
|
|
| "I don"t know anything about music. In my line you don"t have
to." | |
|
Elvis Presley
|
|
| "I hate music, especially when it"s played." | |
|
Jimmy Durante
|
|
| "I know only two tunes: one of them is "Yankee Doodle" and the other
one isn"t." | |
|
Ulysses S. Grant
|
|
| "I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car
going really fast, and stick it out the window. The harmonica sounds
?amazing.?" | |
|
Steven Wright
|
|
| "I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of
eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment
on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then
told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. "That"s different. For a
monkey, it"s terrific."" | |
|
Igor Stravinsky
|
|
| "I sought my soul, But my soul I could not see. I sought my God, But
my God eluded me. I sought my brother, And I found all three." | |
|
William Blake
|
|
| "If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would
only open my eyes a little more." | |
|
Jules Renard
|
|
| "If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer
need to exist." | |
|
Ned Rorem
|
|
| "If ya ain?t got it in ya, ya can?t blow it out." | |
|
Louis ?Satchmo? Armstrong
|
|
| "If you feel like singing along, don"t." | |
|
James Taylor
|
|
| "In music the passions enjoy themselves." | |
|
Friedrich Nietzsche
|
|
| "In or orchestra we have many nationalities, types, and temperaments.
We have learned to forget individual likes, dislikes, and differences of
temperament for the sake of music to which we have dedicated our lives. I
often wonder if we could not solve the world?s problems on a similar basis
of harmony. Think what a single individual in a symphony orchestra can
accomplish by giving up his individual traits and ambitions in the service
of music.... Suppose that in life you had the same all-embracing love for
the whole of mankind and for your neighbor in particular. Only when every
one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will
the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest
Conductor of all." | |
|
Artur Rodzinski
|
|
| "It Don"t Mean a Thing If It Ain"t Got That Swing." | |
|
Duke Ellington
|
|
| "It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched
by the pull of opposites--opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties.
Where there is no polarity--where energies flow smoothly in one
direction--there will be much doing but no music." | |
|
Eric Hoffer
|
|
| "LYRE, n. An ancient instrument of torture." | |
|
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
|
|
| "Maybe it"s not as bad as it sounds." | |
|
Mark Twain
|
|
| "Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast, To soften rocks, or
bend a knotted oak. By magic numbers and persuasive sound." | |
|
William Congreve
|
|
| "Music inflames temperament." | |
|
Jim Morrison
|
|
| "Music is a means of Rapid Transportation." | |
|
John Cage
|
|
| "Music is a revelation; a revelation loftier than all wisdom and all
philosophy." | |
|
Ludwig van Beethoven
|
|
| "Music is esentially useless, as is life." | |
|
George Santayana
|
|
| "Music is Love in search of a word." | |
|
Sidney Lanier
|
|
| "Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that can calm the
agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful
presents God has given us." | |
|
Martin Luther
|
|
| "Music is the art of thinking with sounds." | |
|
Jules Combarieu
|
|
| "Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or
sarcastic thing." | |
|
John Erskine
|
|
| "Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting
without being aware that it is counting." | |
|
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
|
|
| "Music is the universal language of mankind." | |
|
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
|
|
| "Music is the vernacular of the human soul." | |
|
Geoffrey Latham
|
|
| "Music makes one feel so romantic ? at least it always gets on one"s
nerves ? which is the same thing nowadays." | |
|
Oscar Wilde
|
|
| "Music should strike fire from the heart of man, And bring tears from
the eyes of woman." | |
|
Beethoven
|
|
| "Music was invented to confirm human loneliness." | |
|
Lawrence Durrell
|
|
| "Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the
violinist." | |
|
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
|
|
| "Music"s golden tongue Flatter"d to tears this aged man and
poor." | |
|
John Keats
|
|
| "Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we
have below." | |
|
Joseph Addison
|
|
| "Never look at the trombones. You"ll only encourage them." | |
|
Richard Strauss
|
|
| "No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as
it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the
finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and
listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our
lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget
altogether to live them." | |
|
Alan Watts
|
|
| "Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in
Italian." | |
|
Henry Louis Mencken
|
|
| "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts." | |
|
Percy Bysshe Shelley
|
|
| "Philosophy is the highest music." | |
|
Plato
|
|
| "Psychologists have found that music does things to you whether you
like it or not. Fast tempos invariably raise your pulse, respiration, and
blood pressure; slow music lowers them." | |
|
Doron K. Antrim
|
|
| "Reber [Johnson; a violinist] also got off another one, after I"d
played over the Second Violin Sonata for him?that harmless piece. "After
stuff like that"?he said?"if you consider that music, and like it, how can
you like Brahms or any good music?" That is a very common attitude among
almost all the well known lilies. They take it [i.e., that attitude] for
granted?a kind of self-evident axiom, a settled-for-life matter, ipso
facto, admitting of no argument. The classical is good for all time, the
modern is bad for all time?so if you like one, you can"t like the other.
Describing the reaction of a typical professional musician to his, and
other twentieth-century, compositions. "Lilies" was one of Ives" names for
most of the concert goers of his era, who expected all music to be
conventional and pretty." | |
|
Charles Edward Ives
|
|
| "Since I am coming to that holy room Where, with thy choir of saints
for evermore I shall be made thy music, as I come I tune the instrument
here at the door, And what I must do then, think here before." | |
|
John Donne
|
|
| "Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie." | |
|
John Milton
|
|
| "Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long,
long ago." | |
|
Thomas Haynes Bayly
|
|
| "The choirs left the main tune and soared two octaves past heaven in
a descant to rattle the bones and surge the heart." | |
|
Henry Mitchell
|
|
| "The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns
longer." | |
|
Victor Borge
|
|
| "The effects of good music are not just because it"s new; on the
contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it." | |
|
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
|
|
| "The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them.
The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men." | |
|
Ralph Vaughan Williams
|
|
| "The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play
the violin." | |
|
Honoré de Balzac
|
|
| "The notes I handle no better than many pianists, But the pauses
between the notes ? ah, that is where the art resides!" | |
|
Arthur Schnabel
|
|
| "The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in
it." | |
|
Henry David Thoreau
|
|
| "The typical rock fan is not smart enough to know when he is being
dumped on." | |
|
Francis Vincent "Frank" Zappa, Jr.
|
|
| "There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that
does not find relief in music." | |
|
George Eliot
|
|
| "There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time,
when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time
well spent." | |
|
Michel de Montaigne
|
|
| "There"s music in the sighing of a reed; There"s music in the gushing
of a rill; There"s music in all things, if we have ears; The earth is but
the music of the spheres." | |
|
Lord George Gordon Byron
|
|
| "There?s many a good tune played on an old fiddle." | |
|
Samuel Butler, the Younger
|
|
| "They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they
are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue
guitar."" | |
|
Wallace Stevens
|
|
| "To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose
the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad
Ravel." | |
|
Maurice Ravel
|
|
| "Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall
truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all
reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to
feel. Art does not tolerate Reason." | |
|
Albert Camus
|
|
| "We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have
language.... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness,
and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" of nature as I can
guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music." | |
|
Lewis Thomas
|
|
| "We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are
the movers and shakers Of the world forever, it seems." | |
|
|
|
| "When I don"t like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to
it more closely. [Attributed]" | |
|
Florent Schmitt
|
|
| "When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something
they never had, and never will have." | |
|
Edgar Watson "Ed" Howe
|
|
| "When thunder comes it relieves the tension and promotes positive
action. Music can do the same by making people enthusiastic and united
together. When used to promote good it brings them closer to
heaven." | |
|
I Ching
|