Quotes on Music
Opinionated quotations from the famous and not-so-famous.

My mother wanted me to take piano lessons, but I never wanted to, because that is something you have to learn, like you have to learn to type, and to me, that has nothing to do with music.

Ryo Kawasaki

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.

Claude Debussy

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Jean Genet

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.

Bjork (adapted)

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Vance Packard

Being in a band is really great when you're 20. When you're 30, it's kind of 'Spinal Tap,' and when you're 40, it's just pathetic.

Mark Mothersbaugh

Composers shouldn't think too much, it interferes with their plagiarism.

Howard Dietz

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Jean Cocteau

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

Opera: the graveyard of melody.

Unknown

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Van Morrison

To me, music is very personal and should be enjoyed alone.

Duane Alan Hahn

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