133 Inspirational Music Quotes

Music has been an enduring source of inspiration for people across the globe, spanning cultures, languages, and generations. Its ability to evoke emotions, ignite passion, and foster creativity is unparalleled. Whether it's a melody that lifts the spirit or lyrics that resonate with the soul, music has the power to transform moods and motivate actions. In this collection, we delve into 133 of the most inspiring music quotes, capturing the essence of what makes music so universally significant and deeply personal. These quotes celebrate the profound impact of music on our lives and offer insight into the thoughts of those who have been moved by its magic. Whether you're a musician, a listener, or simply seeking a bit of inspiration, these quotes are sure to strike a chord.

1. “This machine kills fascists.” - Woody Guthrie

2. “If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.” - Keith Richards

3. “Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.” - G. K. Chesterton

4. “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” - Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

5. “People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.” - Nick Hornby

6. “How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?” - Jane Swan

7. “Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..” - Pablo Casals

8. “We get a little further from perfection, each year on the road,I guess that's what they call character,I guess that's just the way it goes,better to be dusty than polished,like some store window mannequin,why don't you touch me where i'm rusty,let me stain your hands” - Ani DiFranco

9. “And, in the endThe love you takeis equal to the love you make.” - Paul McCartney

10. “I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off.” - Ani DiFranco

11. “A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.” - Kevin Brockmeier

12. “The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.” - Bruce Springsteen

13. “Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.” - Dave Hickey

14. “My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” - Edith Sitwell

15. “Cold,cold water,surrounds me now,and all I've got is your hand.” - Damien Rice

16. “People haven't always been there for me but music always has.” - Taylor Swift

17. “For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.” - Loren Eiseley

18. “Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words” - Elie Wiesel

19. “But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness” - John Green

20. “Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

21. “I could never be your godAnd I don't even think I want the job anymore” - Stone Sour

22. “If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.” - Oscar Wilde

23. “I used to dream, and I used to vow;I wouldn't dream of it now.” - Morrissey

24. “My love, wherever you are - whatever you are - don't lose faith. I know it's gonna happen someday to you.” - Morrissey

25. “I'd love to...but only with you.” - Morrissey

26. “It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.” - Terry Pratchett

27. “If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.” - Chuck Klosterman

28. “Without enthusiasm nothing great can be effected in art.” - Robert Schumann

29. “You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.” - Robert Schumann

30. “Peace is a conscious choice.” - John Denver

31. “Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.” - Charles Hart

32. “Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup. ” - Ludwig van Beethoven

33. “If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.” - Sir James Barrie

34. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combinationthey produce more hues than can ever been seen.There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations ofthem yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.” - Sun Tzu

35. “I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.” - Rob Sheffield

36. “One person's data is another person's noise.” - K.C. Cole

37. “She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.” - Marcel Proust

38. “I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records stored for even further embarrassment under a box of crumbling Christmas tree ornaments in a Portland, Oregon basement. So I told him I owned nothing of any value.” - Douglas Coupland

39. “if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?” - Lester Bangs

40. “Searching for nothingWondering if I’ll changeI’m trying everythingBut everything still stays the sameI thought if I showed you I could flyWouldn’t need anyone by my sideI'm running backwardsWith broken wings I know I’ll die” - Sully Erna

41. “You make me sick. Because I adore you so..."~Space Dementia” - Matthew Bellamy

42. “I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

43. “He stilled my room, for sure.” - Suze Rotolo

44. “Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, Tomorrow I'll miss you.” - Paul McCartney

45. “The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.” - Lester Bangs

46. “For the children around the world without a home, say a prayer tonight.” - Third Day

47. “Music defines us, for it shapes our souls and minds.” - Jessica Carroll

48. “As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.” - Milan Kundera

49. “Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold.” - Patrick Rothfuss

50. “A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.” - Douglas Adams

51. “Questions, I've got some questionsI want to know youBut what if I could ask you only one thingOnly this one time, what would you tell me?Well maybe you could give me a suggestionSo I could know you, what would you tell me?Maybe you could tell me what to ask youBecause then I'd know you, what would you tell mePlease tell me that there's timeTo make this work for all intents and purposesAnd what are your intentions, will you try?Impressions, you've made impressionsThey're going nowhereThey're just going to wait here if you let themPlease don't let themI want to know youAnd if they're going to haunt mePlease collect themPlease just collect themAnd now I'm beggingI'm begging you to ask me just one questionOne simple questionBecause then you'd know meI'll tell you that there's timeTo make this work for all intents and purposesAt least for my ownWhat is a heart worth if it's just left all alone?Leave it long enough and watch it turn into stoneWhy must we always be untrue?” - Jack Johnson

52. “I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.” - David Byrne

53. “Dying is the fastest route to fame for an aspiring rock star. The dead man’s melodies become profound, acquiring mystery and rising into a realm beyond the reach of human criticism. In the stopping of a heartbeat, the rocker is transformed from decadent hedonist into misunderstood genius. Aye, death and musical stardom go together like Scotland and rain.” - Mark Rice

54. “Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music!” - Lori R. Lopez

55. “Life is one grand sweet song so start the music” - Ronald Reagan

56. “No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.” - Kurt Vonnegut

57. “Well, I sort of don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin.” - Jack White

58. “What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.” - J. S. Bach

59. “How can you understand the language of music, if you will not be an instrument?”—Zarost” - Greg Hamerton

60. “Shall I tell you what rock and roll is, Johnno, from someone who doesn't perform, but observes? It's restless and rude. It's defiant and daring. It's a fist shaken at age. It's a voice that often screams out questions because the answers are always changing. The very young play it because they're searching for some way to express their anger or joy, their confusion and their dreams. Once in a while, and only once in a while, someone comes along who truly understands, who has the gift to transfer all those needs and emotions into music.” - Nora Roberts

61. “Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here.” - Slash, Anthony Bozza

62. “She's thinking that what she's been doing all these years isn't what she wants to do anymore. Sometimes music flows to her and from her, but sometimes it doesn't. Lately that happens more and more, and she can't seem to find what she had and what made her special. But she can't tell her father because he'd be so disappointed in her, so disappointed to find out she's not extraordinary after all.” - Leila Cobo

63. “I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.” - Bjork

64. “You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.” - Maggie Stiefvater

65. “It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.” - Chuck Klosterman

66. “So many will try to destroy me. So many, over and over, coming in periods of greatness. But in this period, I cannot be broken: GAGAKLEIN.” - Lady Gaga

67. “But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.” - Arthur Phillips

68. “In music the passions enjoy themselves.” - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

69. “Speaking unspoken words,music is a good way to say.” - Toba Beta

70. “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” - Walter Lippmann

71. “With a feeling of despondency so intense that it was almost pleasurable, he got out his guitar.So this was to be his condition now.What was he but a fragment of broken churned-uphumanity washed up on this faraway shore? This was where his journey had brought him.... There mus be a song in this...” - Marina Lewycka

72. “...And you're the only one who knows.” - Billy Joel

73. “music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, butyou are the musicWhile the music lasts.” - T.S. Eliot

74. “Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” - C. JoyBell C.

75. “The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it.” - Luanne Rice

76. “For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.” - Anthony Braxton

77. “They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.” - theodor w. adorno

78. “I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.” - Virgil Thomson

79. “Ah, the magic of music, with it, all things are possible.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

80. “With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.” - Aristotle

81. “You’ve got that smile,That only heaven can make.I pray to God everyday,That you keep that smile.Yeah, you are my dream,There’s not a thing I won’t do.I'd give my life up for you,'Cause you are my dream.” - Justin Bieber

82. “I’d spend hours in HMVs, Virgin Megastores and second-hand record shops staffed by greasy-haired 40-year-olds dressed as 20-year-olds, listening to contemporary music of every genre – Britrock, heavy maiden, gang rap, brakebeat. And I came to a startling but unshakeable conclusion: no genuinely good music has been created since 1988.” - Alan Partridge

83. “شو هالإيام اللي وصلنالا قال إنو غني عم يعطي فقير كنو المصاري قشطت لحالا عا هيدا نتفه و هيدا كتير الحلوه دي الحلوه دي الحلوه دي بتعجن في الفجرية بيقولولك من عرق جبينو طلع مصاري هالإنسان طيب كيف هيدا و كيف ملايينو و ما مره شايفينو عرقان مش صحيح مش صحيح مش صحيح الهوا غلاب الغني من تلقاء نفسو حابب يوزع ورق المال .. عال مانو بخيل ابداً على عكسو اتذكركن يا ولاد الحلال ليل يا لال ليل يا لال حول كل واحد منا عندو ستيلو ما بيمنع إنو يصير تنسيق جيبلي لامضيلك بقلم ستيلو كل الشعوب بكرا حتفيق يا سلام يا سلام يا سلام سلم كل المصاري اللي مضبوبي اللي لا بتنعد و لا بتنقاس اصلا من جياب الناس مسحوبي و لازم ترجع عاجياب الناس هي دي هي دي هي دي الأصلية” - زياد الرحباني

84. “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

85. “My mother says we’re supposed to make mistakes. That’s the way we learn.” Rocky Ryan in Bully At Ambush Corner.” - Karen Mueller Coombs

86. “I’m proud of you, son,” he said. “I guess it has finally sunk in that it’s important to stand up for yourself in this world.”Rocky shook his head. “It’s more important to stand up for someone who can’t stand up for herself,” he had answered.Rocky Ryan speaking with his father.” - Karen Mueller Coombs

87. “Without music life would B flat” - Dulcinea Martinez

88. “Fame is not so impossible for people with charisma, passion and talent. Being famous just means you have fans, and even one or two is enough to make you someone special. Ask a music fan who the best guitarist of all time is, and while one group insists that it was Jimmi Hendrix, another group swears that it was Eddie Van Halen instead. There will never be a time when everyone on this planet agrees on something like that, but luckily that's not important. All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing. This is all that you need to be immortalized.” - Ashly Lorenzana

89. “Thousands of cars and a million guitarsScreaming with power in the air!We've found the place where the decibels raceThis army of rock will be thereTo ram it downRam it down!Straight to the heart of this town.Ram it down.Ram it down.Razing the place to the ground,Ram it down!” - Rob Halford

90. “Music fathoms the sky.” - Charles Baudelaire

91. “My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiescence. Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something.” - Kyle Gann

92. “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning” - Plato

93. “Has the industry done to music what McDonald’s has done to eating?” - Tiffanie DeBartolo

94. “Don't give up. It's just the weight of the world.” - Josh Groban

95. “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

96. “Music links us humans, heart to heart...Across time and space, and life and death.” - Nancy Werlin

97. “We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.” - Rob Sheffield

98. “Righteous, I like that. Kinda fitting when you think about it. If we danced and shared music, we'd be too busy en-joy-in' life to start a war.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

99. “I'm in love with a girl who knows me better.Fell for the woman just when I met her.Took my sweet time when I was bitter.Someone understands,She knows how treat a fella right.Give me that feeling every night,She wants show love when I wanna fight,Now someone understand me.” - Juxtaposition

100. “I set out on a narrow way many years ago, hoping I would find true love along the broken road” - Rascal Flatts

101. “I didn't just hear music. It seemed as if I were part of the music.” - Don Piper

102. “I will fucking kill you and anyone else who gets in the way of me and my tunes.” - Bradley Sands

103. “Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck -- it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion.” - Muriel Barbery

104. “Because there's beauty in the breakdown.” - Imogen Heap

105. “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” - Victor Hugo

106. “La gente me pregunta "por qué no lo dejas?". El hecho es que no me puedo retirar hasta que no estire la pata. Creo que no acaban de entender lo que gano con todo esto. No lo hago sólo por el dinero ni por ti. Lo hago por mi.” - Keith Richards

107. “Deep within I'm shaken by the violence of existing for only you...” - Sarah McLachlan

108. “Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?” - Isaac Marion

109. “It's probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.” - Olivier Messiaen

110. “Music never goes away. It is always available, but we are not always available to music.” - Robert Fripp

111. “Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

112. “Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.” - Eric Church

113. “Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.” - Rebecca Solnit

114. “One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience” - Keith Richards

115. “For all his claims to be just a propagandist, [Bernard Shaw's] writing has an effect nearer to that of music than most of those who have claimed to be writing "dramas of feeling." His plays are a joy to watch, not because they purport to deal with social and political problems, but because they are such wonderful displays of conspicuous waste; the conversational energy displayed by his characters is so far in excess of what their situation requires that, if it were to be devoted to practical action, it would wreck the world in five minutes. The Mozart of English letters he is not – the music of the Marble Statue is beyond him – the Rossini, yes. He has all the brio, humor, cruel clarity and virtuosity of that master of opera buffa.” - W.H. Auden

116. “In my imagination you're waiting lying on your side with your hands between your thighs.” - Arctic Monkeys

117. “No matter how much money he'd been offered or how many glittering stars had requested duets, he hadn't sung for them.But he'd sung for me.” - Karen Healey

118. “She plays music to heal herself, but nothing can heal her brokenness.” - Neal Shusterman

119. “I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?” - David Byrne

120. “Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.” - Lana Del Rey

121. “Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.” - Isabel Allende

122. “El silencio es el lienzo en blanco, el marco, sobre lo que trabajas; y no tratas de ahogarlo.” - Keith Richards

123. “Oh darkness, I feel like letting go.” - Sarah McLachlan

124. “First character, then ability.” - Shinichi Suzuki

125. “Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.” - Woflgang Amadeus Mozart

126. “...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. "Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet,” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey dAurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush...” - Marcel Proust

127. “Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.” - Lord Dunsany

128. “What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

129. “When you have two notes from two different performances Auto-Tuned, it sounds like a car horn. And then you add harmonies, and it starts to sound like baby seals honking." - Tom Lord-Alge on Auto-Tune” - Greg Milner

130. “Music is a second language to my heart.” - Mara Arps

131. “There were no windows in the Stockholders' Records Section of the Treasurer's Department of the American Forge and Foundry Company. But the soft, sweet music from the loudspeaker on the green wall by the clock, music that increased the section's productivity by 3 percent, kept pace with the seasons, and provided windows of a sort for the staff.--"Bomar” - Kurt Vonnegut

132. “I didn't do music to live; I lived so that I could do music.” - Charlotte Eriksson

133. “Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they are the symptoms of an overflowing (jaillissante) or exhausted (épuisée) life. But an artist cannot be content with an exhausted life, nor with a personal life. One does not write with one's ego, one's memory, and one's illnesses. In the act of writing there's an attempt to make life something more personal, to liberate life from what imprisons it...There is a profound link between signs, the event, life, and vitalism. It is the power of nonorganic life, that which can be found in a line of a drawing, a line of writing, a line of music. It is organisms that die, not life. There is no work of art that does not indicate an opening for life, a path between the cracks. Everything I have written has been vitalistic, at least I hope so, and constitutes a theory of signs and the event.” - Gilles Deleuze