Music Quotes

When you move like a jellyfish rhyth don't mean nothing. You go with the flow, you don't stop. Move like a jellyfish, rhythm means nothing.You go with the flow you don't stop.

~ Jack Johnson

If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know. Louis Armstrong

~ Louis Armstrong

Bruce has always been so nice to me, which is crazy, because he's one of my heroes. I'll never forget being at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony the year Bruce and Paul McCartney were inducted. We were at the bar, and Bruce was talking to Paul, and he turned to me and said, 'I can't believe I'm talking to Paul McCartney!' I thought, 'I can't believe I'm talking to Bruce Springsteen, who's talking to Paul McCartney!

~ Melissa Etheridge

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones I Wanna Be Sedated is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

~ Neil Gaiman

It's time, my childrenWhen the waves rise high When the waters run deepWhen the clock strikes midnightYou'll feel the mark of Zero HourAnd you'll never be the same again

~ Lisa Mangum

Music originated from God and was created solely for his worship, his glory, and his pleasure.

~ Pedro Okoro

Often the right path is the one that may be hardest for you to follow. But the hard path is also the one that will make you grow as a human being.

~ Karen Mueller Coombs

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

~ Joe Hill

For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.

~ Jennifer Armstrong

Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is con­nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.

~ Conan O'brien

Always wear cute pyjamas to bed, you'll never know who u will meet in your dreams.

~ Joel Madden

You can put off your dreams, your desires, your careers, your farms. You can avoid your responsibilities, obligations, promises, and sovereign rights. But any person who wants to make music, and doesn't, is a goddamned fool.

~ Jenna Woginrich

Goth was sort of the melancholy cousin of punk that says: there's a lot of evil in this world, there's a lot of very mean spirited people and that makes me sad.

~ Aurelio Voltaire Hernández

Your youth is the most important thing you will ever have. It's when you will connect to music like a primal urge, and the memories attached to the songs will never leave you. Please hold on to everything. Keep every note, mix tape, concert ticket stub, and memory you have of music from your youth. It'll be the one thing that might keep you young, even if you aren't anymore.

~ Butch Walker

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

~ John Cage

People spend thousands of dollars on stereos. Sometimes tens of thousands. There is a specialist industry right here in the States which builds stereo gear to a standard you wouldn't believe. Tubed amplifiers which cost more than a house. Speakers taller than me. Cables thicker than a garden hose. Some army guys had that stuff. I'd heard it on bases around the world. Wonderful. But they were wasting their money. Because the best stereo in the world is free. Inside your head. It sounds as good as you want it to. As loud as you want it to be.

~ Lee Child

The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.

~ Peter S. Beagle

We take gingko to sharpen our memories. We could be memorizing song lyrics instead.

~ Joan Oliver Goldsmith

Kids on the Youtube, learning how to be cool.

~ Toby Keith

Fate, up against your

~ Echo And The Bunnymen

The piano ain't got no wrong notes.

~ Thelonious Monk

Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.

~ Martin Luther

There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself.

~ Marty Rubin

Rock'n'roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages--they could be 15, 25 or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit... -Calvin Johnson

~ Michael Azerrad

Now I think I understand how this world can overcome a man.

~ James Sullivan

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

~ Cornel West

Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.

~ Charles Frazier

I just happen to comprehend the low standards of the majority of the music-buying public, and I don’t care how condescending that sounds, it’s true. They always go for the shiny gimmicks. Always.

~ Tiffanie Debartolo

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.

~ Tom Piazza

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

~ J.m. Coetzee

Yet, for my part, I was never usually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fail when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?

~ Henry David Thoreau

The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.

~ Emanuel Ax

Rush to danger, wind up nowhere.

~ Morrissey

Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!

~ Morrissey

(regarding the prelude from suite two)... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.

~ Eric Siblin

Some days there won't be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.

~ Emory Austin

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

~ Carl Sandburg

Life is not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away.

~ George Strait

Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.

~ Stevie Wonder