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Looking for music quotations? Here are some of the quotations that we have come across - that might prove helpful. They have been listed in the order of popularity. Please submit your own music to us and we will add it to our growing database.

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The plain fact is that music per se means nothing; it is sheer sound, and the interpreter can do no more with it than his own capacities, mental and spiritual, will allow, and the same applies to the listener.
Mingled Chime (1944) ch. 3
Sir Thomas Beecham

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it.
In H. Proctor-Gregg Beecham Remembered (1976) pt. 2, p. 1
Sir Thomas Beecham

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
In New York Herald Tribune 9 Mar. 1961
Sir Thomas Beecham

Good music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty.
Speech, c. 1950, in New York Times 9 Mar. 1961
Sir Thomas Beecham

Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands - and all you can do is scratch it.
To a cellist (attributed)
Sir Thomas Beecham

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.
The Mourning Bride (1697) act 1, sc. 1
William Congreve

Music alone with sudden charms can bind
The wand’ring sense, and calm the troubled mind.
'Hymn to Harmony'
William Congreve

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all... music expresses itself.
In Esquire Dec. 1972
Igor Stravinsky

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O! it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough! no more:
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical.
Twelfth Night (1601) act 1, sc. 1, l. 1
William Shakespeare

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

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
 

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

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
John Keats
 

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
Martin Luther

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
Bill Cosby

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Plato

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
Friedrich Nietzsche