I’ve always enjoyed quotes about music…these little jewels that show the context in which folks view music’s role in their lives. En-Joy! 🙂

A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. – Chinese Proverb

A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good. – Colbie Caillat

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

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

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh. – Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvelous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man. – Frédéric Chopin

Can a mere song change a people’s minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart, and the heart may change your mind. – Elvis Costello

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

Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing. – Rebbe Nachman

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

He who sings frightens away his ills. – Miguel de Cervantes

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. – John Keats

How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations? – Jane Swan

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, This Song Will Save Your Life

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it. – Igor Stravinsky

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things. – Tom Waits

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation. – Criss Jami, Killisophy

I’ve always said music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think. – Kenny Rogers

I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments. – John Barrowman

I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow. – Bryce W. Anderson

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

If everyone started off the day singing, just think how happy they’d be. – Lauren Myracle, Shine

If I cannot fly, let me sing. – Stephen Sondheim

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

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.’ – Kurt Vonnegut

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. – Albert Einstein

If music be the food of love, play on. – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

If Music is a Place-then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple. – Vera Nazarian

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing. – J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin’ words. – Dolly Parton

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. – Richard Nixon

If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, then the end won’t be long. – Pete Doherty

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. – Nina Simone

Life and love go on, let the music play. – Johnny Cash

Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music. – Ronald Reagan

Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning, there is mystery; in the end, there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile. – Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song

Live your truth. Express your love. Share your enthusiasm. Take action towards your dreams. Walk your talk. Dance and sing to your music. Embrace your blessings. Make today worth remembering. – Steve Maraboli

Love is friendship set to music. – Jackson Pollock

Most people die with their music still locked up inside them. – Benjamin Disraeli

Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens. – Maria von Trapp

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. – Marcel Marceau

Music can change the world because it can change people. – Bono

Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch. – Debasish Mridha

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

Music could ache and hurt; that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide. – Pat Conroy

Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening. – Aretha Franklin

Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words. – Elie Wiesel

Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts. – Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

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 expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent. – Victor Hugo

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. – Plato

Music gives color to the air of the moment. – Karl Lagerfeld

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody. – Joshua Logan

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours. – Elton John

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe. – Lao Tzu

Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape. – Shania Twain

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, According to the Rolling Stones

Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness. – Jason Mraz

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul. – Johann Sebastian Bach

Music is an outburst of the soul. – Frederick Delius

Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. – Sergei Rachmaninov

Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung. – David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories

Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you, or it doesn’t. – Gene Simmons

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

Music is healing. Music holds things together. – Prince

Music is life itself. – Louis Armstrong

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

Music is my religion. – Jimi Hendrix

Music is not take it or leave it; Music is life or death! – Joss Stirling, Finding Sky

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. – Thomas Fuller

Music is probably the only real magic I have encoutered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real…it moves…it heals…it communicates. And does all these incredible things. – Tom Petty

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

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart. – Pablo Casals

Music is the emotional life of most people. – Leonard Cohen

Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common. – Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. – Alphonse de Lamartine

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

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing. – John Erskine

Music is the only thing I’ve ever known that doesn’t have any rules at all. – Josh Homme

Music is the shorthand of emotion. – Leo Tolstoy

Music is the soundtrack of your life. – Dick Clark

Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have. – Alex Gaskarth

Music is the strongest form of magic. – Marilyn Manson

Music is the tool to express life — and all that makes a difference. – Herbie Hancock

Music is the universal language of mankind. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together. – Edgar Winter

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. – Thomas Carlyle

Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize. – Napoleon Bonaparte

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 is…a higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy. – Ludwig van Beethoven

Music isn’t just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It’s a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it’s joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message? – Orson Scott Card

Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me. – Eddie Van Halen

Music replays the past memories, awakens our forgotten worlds and makes our minds travel. – Michael Bassey Johnson

Music should be an essential part of every analysis. – Carl Jung

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

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

Music…can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. – Leonard Bernstein

Music…is the only real religion that is worth devoting your soul to. It is the last remnant of the primal scream, the funeral dirge and the wedding march. It is the light that keeps me out of the shadows, and it is the reason my immortal soul is not in dire straits. – Corey Taylor, Seven Deadly Sins

Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts. – Billy Joel

My ambition was to live like music. – Mary Gaitskill

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary. – Martin Luther

Once again, she was free. Once again, she found peace. It was music that freed her soul from the dungeon of her mind. – Wiss Auguste, The Illusions of Hope

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. – Bob Marley

Or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts. – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song. – Michael Jackson

People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has. – Taylor Swift

Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you. – Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera

Some days, there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway. – Emory Austin

Some people have lives; some people have music. – John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie. – John Milton

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

That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people, and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons. – Dave Grohl

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. – Bruce Springsteen

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music. – Jonathan Edwards

The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be. – Pete Seeger

The more you love music, the more music you love. – Tom Moon, 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable. – H. Auden

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between. – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start. – Jodi Picoult

The only truth is music. – Jack Kerouac

The piano keys are black and white but they sound like a million colors in your mind. – Maria Cristina Mena

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, Love Is a Mix Tape

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master. – Duke Ellington

The world’s most famous and popular language is music. – PSY

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats. – Albert Schweitzer

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. – George Eliot

Those who wish to sing always find a song. – Unknown

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable. – Aaron Copland

We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. – Arthur O’Shaughnessy

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

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

When you’re happy, you enjoy the music, but when you’re sad, you understand the lyrics. – Frank Ocean

Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat? – Goldie Hawn

Without music, life would be a blank to me. – Jane Austen, Emma

Without music, life would be a mistake. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought. – Yip Harburg

You can cage the singer but not the song. – Harry Belafonte