Top 100 Music Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best music quotes ever written, picked out of the full music archive on QuoteForever. You will find Bob Marley, Chico Hamilton, Count Basie and Dave Brubeck among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

When you play, never mind who listens to you.

2

No matter what culture you're from, everyone loves music.

3

Music is the strongest form of magic.

4

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

5

All of heaven we have below.

6

Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain-- For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.

7

We are able to feel and learn very quickly through music, through art, through poetry some spiritual things that we would otherwise learn very slowly.

8

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

9

The musician who always plays on the same string is laughed at.

10

There are notes between notes, you know.

11

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

12

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

13

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

14

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

15

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

16

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

17

Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.

18

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.

19

From the metaphysical point of view there is nothing that can touch the formless except the art of music which in itself is formless.

20

The river was always there inside of me, but I was very shy. I could see that this was my path. I felt destiny in my own music.

21

Regarding the current Broadway revival of The Music Man, Jay Nordlinger wrote: There will always be those who sniff that the show is "feel good"-but, oh, it feels good to feel good. And the main reason The Music Man feels so good is that it is good-a great American musical.

22

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

23

Music has a very powerful and wonderful influence in establishing feelings and moods that can lift and elevate your thoughts and your actions.

24

If you don't have sex and you don't do drugs, your rock 'n' roll better be awfully good.

25

Never look at the brass - it only encourages them.

26

Why, after all, must everyone like music? That they are missing something is just the lover's opinion.

27

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

28

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.

29

Thank you so much for supporting me from the day I stepped foot into the music industry. It really means something to me to have Maya Angelou speak on my behalf. It also means a lot to have Oprah on my speed dial!

Music should be healing. Music should uplift the soul. Music should ... - Hazrat Inayat Khan 30

Music should be healing. Music should uplift the soul. Music should inspire.

31

I've dreamed of this a thousand times before But in my dreams I couldn't love you more I will give you my heart Until the end of time... You're all I need, my love, my Valentine

32

Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

33

... all of the great sounds that James Burton and Jimmy Bryant were getting, came out of Telecasters

34

I direct a lot of TV commercials and music videos.

35

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.

36

Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

37

I always like to get local music when I'm in another country.

38

We're here to have a ball.

39

Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand I'll do with my left.

40

I can't understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out & look at it?

41

I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play.

42

Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward she would tell me, 'I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.' And I would believe-for a few months-that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom's Hell is for Children tour was going to be her last tour?

43

Charlie Christian showed me a lot, and was a great help, but even then, I realised that if I was going to make it, it was no use copying Charlie

44

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

45

I always listen to a lot of different music when I am working on a project.

46

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can't blame the computer. If there's no soul in the music, it's because nobody put it there.

47

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

48

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

49

Get up, stand up, Stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.

50

Every day the bucket a-go a well, one day the bottom a-go drop out.

51

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.

52

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.

53

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.

54

Jimi Hendrix was the most exciting guitarist I've ever heard.

55

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

56

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.

57

I want people to hear the presence of God in the music.

58

You only get better by playing.

59

What's interesting about a person without problems?

60

Music rearranges your molecular structure.

61

I like to be with my friends and my family, listen to music and read books. Things like that relax me.

62

Story book endings, fairytales coming true.

63

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

64

Music fathoms the sky.

65

Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.

66

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

67

I can play all I know in eight bars.

68

I no longer wanted to satisfy myself. I really want to connect with the world and make my music mean something to people.

69

I don't dig staying in one groove.

70

The type of band that I have now, the type of music that we're playing you either like it or you dislike it. If you dislike it, you probably don't know why. By the same token, you can't even really say why you like it.

71

At this stage of my life, I've dedicated myself to playing what I want to play, how I want to play it for the rest of my time. Regardless of whether one might like it or one might not like it, this is where I am.

72

Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there.

73

I don't believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

74

I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

75

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

76

The roots of Cuban music are in my head.

77

If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.

78

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

79

Keep on listening & tapping your feet.

80

Drugs have nothing to do with the creation of music. In fact, they are dumb and self indulgent. Kind of like sucking your thumb!

81

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

82

An animal can learn to fight, but to sing beautiful things and make people believe them.

83

Thank God for books and music and things I can think about." --Charlie Gordan

84

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

85

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

86

Rock 'n' roll will never die. There'll always be some arrogant little brat who wants to make music with a guitar.

87

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

88

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

89

Jimi Hendrix could play better than our best guys and he did it while he was dancing while being completely outrageous.

90

I think I could walk into any music shop anywhere and with a guitar off the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound just like me. There's no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound.

91

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.

92

The Beach Boys are not a superstar group. The music is the superstar of the group.

93

If it's not a hit, switch.

94

to deny that music powerfully influences our thoughts and conduct is either ignorant or a deliberate lie. Anyone who listens to music has been moved by it. It's music, that's the point.

95

There's nothing better than live music. It's raw energy, and raw energy feeds the soul.

96

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

97

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don't change.

98

I got home, picked up my ax, turned on the four-track and just played it ... I played three solos back to back on Cemetery Gates ... the next morning, the second and third solos weren't bad, but the first had that first take magic ! .. I didn't touch it.

99

They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

100

Music, I suppose, will be the thing that sustains me in the time of my life when I am too old for sex and not quite ready to meet God. It has always been an essential part of me.

More Music quotes

This is the short list. The full music quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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