What is Music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

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 men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. Sydney Smith

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it. ~Doménico Cieri Estrada

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~Henry David Thoreau

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet

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

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

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 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

Play the music, not the instrument. ~Author Unknown

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger. ~John Chesson

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan

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

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford

What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell. ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra

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

...where music dwells
Lingering - and wandering on as loth to die...
~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge"

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Music is what life sounds like. ~Eric Olson

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

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 literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
~William Cowper

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.
~Robert Browning

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland

What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial. ~Leonard Bernstein

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. ~Paul Simon

Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory -
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green


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

The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher

The city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown

Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.
~Joseph Addison


Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril. ~Richard Baker

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

Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard

An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

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

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"

No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961