Music is a feature of every known civilization, both past, and present, and it is found in all human cultures worldwide.
The emotions evoked by music, as well as the attitudes of its creators and performers, and the settings in which it is performed can change across time and place. Music that one person enjoys may be difficult to listen to for another, and vice versa!
These music quotations explain what music is, how it makes us feel when we listen to or play it, and how powerful it can be.
You’ll find music quotes from some of your favorite performers and composers, whether you like Classical, Jazz, Country, Rock, or Pop. Play your favorite music and relax!
90+ Quotes About Music to Enjoy It Silently
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.― Victor hugo
Where words fail, music speaks.___Hans Christian Anderson
How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?___Jane Swan
Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music. – Ronald Reagan
Without music, life would be a mistake.― Friedrich Nietzsche
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 only thing I’ve ever known that doesn’t have any rules at all.___Josh Homme
Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.__Kahlil Gibran
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.___John Erskine
Music is life itself. – Louis Armstrong
Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.___John Paul Friedrich Richter
If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.___Vera Nazarin
People haven’t always been there for me but music always has.― Taylor Swift
Love is friendship set to music.___Jackson Pollock
Music is the universal language of mankind.___Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.___Alphonse de Lamartine
Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.___Oscar Wilde
Music is the soundtrack of your life. – Dick Clark
Some people have lives; some people have music.― John Green
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.___Thomas Fuller
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
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.___Bob Marley
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.___Confucius
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.― Langston Hughes
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.___Guy de Maupassant
Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.___Baruch Spinoza
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.___Berthold Auerbach
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.___G.K. Chesterton
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.____Leonard Bernstein
Music is the strongest form of magic.___Marilyn Manson
Music is love in search of a word.– Sidney Lanier
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
Without music, life would be a blank to me.___Jane Austen
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.― Victor Hugo
Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.___Sarah Dessen
Philosophy is the highest music.__Plato
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.___Leo Tolstoy
Music is the shorthand of emotion. – Leo Tolstoy
Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize.___Napoleon Bonaparte
Music gives color to the air of the moment.___Karl Lagerfeld
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.― Charles Darwin,
The only truth is music. – Jack Kerouac
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. – Robert Fripp
Without music, life would be a mistake.___Friedrich Nietzsche
Country music is three chords and the truth.___Harlan Howard
Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.___Pablo Casals
Some people have lives; some people have music.____John Green
The only truth is music.― Jack Kerouac
Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.___Maria von Trapp
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.― Maya Angelou
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.___Edward Bulwar Lytton
Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.___Percy Bysshe Shelley
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.___Henry David Thoreau
Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.___Johnny Depp
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.___Victor Hugo
There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.___Albert Schweitzer
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.― Friedrich Nietzsche
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.― Edith Sitwell
Music is an outburst of the soul. – Frederick Delius
Quotes About Writing, Playing, and Listening to Music
Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.___Benjamin Disraeli
Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.___Emory Austin
If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.― Emma Goldman
As long as we live, there is never enough singing. – Martin Luther
A fine work of art – music, dance, painting, story – has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.___Robert McKee
I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.___William James
I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.___Tom Waits
He who sings frightens away his ills. – Miguel de Cervantes
When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.___Alan Watts
Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa – Who knows most, knows least.___Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing.___Rebbe Nachman
The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.___Pete Seeger
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.___W.H. Auden
I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments.___John Barrowman
Those who wish to sing always find a song. – Unknown
I believe that a person’s taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know.___Leila Sales
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.___Sun Tzu
Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.___Martin Luther
The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.__Roy Ayers
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.___Plato
The world’s most famous and popular language is music. – Psy
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.___Joshua Logan
We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters.__Eddie Van Halen
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.___Louis Armstrong
The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.___Jodi Picoult
Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.__Marcel Marceau
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.___Leopold Stokowski
Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician’s curse.___Patrick Rothfuss
The wise musicians are those who play what they can master. – Duke Ellington
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.___Rob Sheffield
Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there’s no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.___Jerry Seinfeld
Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.___Keith Richards
Music is well said to be the speech of angels. – Thomas Carlyle
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.___Thomas Merton
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.___Mark Twain
For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.___Eric Clapton
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.___Edith Sitwell