1. I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

- Tom Waits

2. Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

- Leonard Bernstein

3. 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

4. Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.

- Jason Mraz

5. A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.

- Mark Twain

6. Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn’t.

- Gene Simmons

7. 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

8. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

- Frank Zappa

9. A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

- Leopold Stokowski

10. The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

- Bruce Springsteen

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

- Rebbe Nachman

12. Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

- Claude Debussy

13. Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

- Thomas Fuller

14. Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape.

- Shania Twain

15. Music comes from a place we don’t know.

- Chris Martin

16. Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.

- John Paul Friedrich Richter

17. One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

- Bob Marley

18. 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

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

- Martin Luther

20. Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

- Pablo Casals

21. Life and love go on, let the music play.

- Johnny Cash

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

- John Barrowman

23. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.

- Truman Capote

24. Without music, life would be a blank to me.

- Jane Austen

25. 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.

- Orson Scott Card

26. There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.

- Franz Joseph Haydn

27. If you’ve lost your faith in love and music then the end won’t be long.

- Pete Doherty

28. To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.

- Osho

29. Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.

- Yip Harburg

30. ‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic beyond all we do here!’

- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s S

31. Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it’s not OK, but you can change it.

- Bono

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

- Nina Simone

33. Music gives color to the air of the moment.

- Karl Lagerfeld

34. Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

- Oscar Wilde

35. If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.

- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

36. 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

37. The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

38. 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

39. 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

40. Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.

- Ludwig van Beethoven

41. Music – what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!

- Maria von Trapp

42. My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

- Edward Elgar

43. 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

44. Philosophy is the highest music.

- Plato

45. The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

- W.H. Auden

46. Music is the universal language of mankind.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

- Jodi Picoult

48. Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician’s curse.

- Patrick Rothfuss

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

- Paul Simon

50. Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

- Pat Conroy

51. Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

- Martin Luther

52. Music should be an essential part of every analysis.

- Carl Jung

53. Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

- Baruch Spinoza

54. 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

55. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

- Aldous Huxley

56. You are the music while the music lasts.

- T.S. Eliot

57. Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.

- Johann Sebastian Bach

58. Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

- Louis Armstrong

59. Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

- Marcel Marceau

60. 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

61. I’ve always said music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think.

- Kenny Rogers

62. Without music, life would be a mistake.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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

- Pete Seeger

64. Music – not just the lyrics, but the music itself – expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

- Sarah Churchwell

65. Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

- Joshua Logan

66. 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

67. Some people have lives; some people have music.

- John Green

68. If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practicing, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.

- Robert Schumann

69. A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

- Guy de Maupassant

70. Who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once.

- Robert Browning

71. Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.

- Kahlil Gibran

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

- Aaron Copland

73. Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.

- Sergei Rachmaninov

74. Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.

- Johnny Depp

75. 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

76. My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

- Bob Marley

77. Where words fail, music speaks.

- Hans Christian Anderson

78. I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.

- Bryce Anderson

79. Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

80. I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

- Duke Ellington

81. Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.

- Benjamin Disraeli

82. We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters.

- Eddie Van Halen

83. Music should be your escape.

- Missy Elliot

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

- Plato

85. I think music in itself is healing. It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we’re from, everyone loves music.

- Billy Joel

86. 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

87. 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

88. I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.

- Ludwig van Beethoven

89. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

90. 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

91. A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

- Dave Grohl

92. I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

- David Bowie

93. 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

94. Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

- Alphonse de Lamartine

95. I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

- William James

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

- Elton John

97. 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

98. 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

99. 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

100. The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.

- Roy Ayers

101. Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.

- Victor Hugo

102. Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.

- Maria von Trapp

103. Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

- Ludwig van Beethoven

104. If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

- Gustav Mahler

105. How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?

- Jane Swan

106. Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.

- Oscar Wilde

107. Country music is three chords and the truth.

- Harlan Howard

108. Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

- George Gershwin

109. Music is everybody’s business. It’s only the publishers who think people own it.

- John Lennon

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

- Colbie Caillat

111. Music is a safe kind of high.

- Jimi Hendrix

112. Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.

- Sarah Dessen

113. He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.

- Hannah Harrington

114. Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

- G.K. Chesterton

115. Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.

- Emory Austin

116. Music is my religion.

- Jimi Hendrix

117. A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.

- Dmitri Shostakovich

118. 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

119. Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

- Langston Hughes

120. My music isn’t just music – its medicine.

- Kanye West

121. 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

122. Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.

- Oliver Sacks

123. Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

- Robert G. Ingersoll

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

125. Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.

- Ray Charles

126. I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

- James Taylor

127. 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

128. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

129. Music is the strongest form of magic.

- Marilyn Manson

130. Music – that’s been my education. There’s not a day that goes by that I take it for granted.

- Billie Joe Armstrong

131. Music is critical in our lives and culture. It’s the inspiration that drives us. It’s also the window to our souls. It’s a reflection as to who we are, what we stand for and where we’re going.

- Bill Walton

132. If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

- Vera Nazarin

133. Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

- Herbie Hancock

134. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

- Berthold Auerbach

135. 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

136. My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.

- Edith Sitwell

137. 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

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

- Maya Angelou

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

- John Erskine

140. There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.

- Albert Schweitzer

141. Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

142. Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

- Douglas Adams

143. Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.

- Billy Joel

144. Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together.

- Edgar Winter

145. To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

- Michael Jackson

146. A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.

- Chinese Proverb

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

- Josh Homme

148. Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

- Confucius

149. Love is friendship set to music.

- Jackson Pollock

150. Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

- Edward Bulwar Lytton

151. 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

152. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy