Tag Archive for 'Nietzsche on music'

Top 30 Music Quotes

The above quote is by Friedrich Nietzsche.
(I assume A.Z. is whoever put the quote on the bench.)

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” – Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, in 1962

“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.” – Elvis Presley

“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

“Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.” – John Lennon

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley

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

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” –  Jimi Hendrix

“There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.” – Johann Sebastian Bach

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

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

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

“A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” – Benny Green

“Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.” – Charlie Parker

“When I first heard Elvis’ voice, I knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody … hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail” – Bob Dylan

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”  – Confucius

“If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.” – Zimbabwe Proverb

“Where words fail, music speaks.” – Hans Christian Andersen

“Music is the shorthand of emotion.”  – Leo Tolstoy

“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” – Frank Zappa

“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.” – Voltaire

“I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.” – Ella Fitzgerald

“Playing ‘Bop’ is like Scrabble with all the vowels missing.” – Duke Ellington

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” – Igor Stravinsky

“MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken.” – Lewis Black

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” – Richard Strauss

“He has a woman’s name and wears makeup. How original.” – Alice Cooper, on Marilyn Manson

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

“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

“The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven’t got the joke yet.” – Oliver Herford