Music Quotes

This is a collection of my favorite music quotes. Post them by your harp to remind yourself why you love to play!

Visit my Harp Quotes page for harp poems and the harp in literature.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
~Leonard Bernstein

Music gives people a voice that is uniquely theirs . . .
-YoYo Ma

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
~Anais Nin

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
~Frederic Chopin

Music has to breathe and sweat. You have to play it live.
~James Brown

If you learn music, you’ll learn most all there is to know.
~Edgar Cayce

Music is nothing separate from me. It is me… You’d have to remove the music surgically.
~Ray Charles

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.
~Miles Davis

You are the music while the music lasts.
~T. S. Eliot

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
~Maya Angelou

Music can change the world.
~Ludwig Van Beethoven

There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
~Johann Sebastian Bach

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossile to be silent.
~Victor Hugo

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world.
~Giuseppe Mazzini

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.
~Hal A. Lingerman

The best music… is essentially there to provide you something.
~Bruce Springsteen

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

My idea is that 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

Play the music, not the instrument. ~Author Unknown

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

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