Category: Music Quotes

For the final entry in this series of music quotes, I found this moving treatise on music, related in the first person as if music herself is speaking to us.  If you have time to listen to some of the…

I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions…

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one…

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Victor Hugo (1802-1886) Quoted in Music Lovers Quotations, edited by Helen Exley.   Hugo was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist.  His most famous…

In the Negro Melodies of America I discover a great and Noble School of Music…. These beautiful and varied themes are the products of the soil. They are the folk songs of the United States.  Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) Quoted in…

How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?  Joy is more joyful, given a tune.  Jane Swan (1925-2010)  Quoted in Music Lovers Quotations, edited by Helen Exley. Jane Swan taught history at…

The man that hath no music in himself,  nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,   is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;   the motions of his spirit are dull as night,  and his affections dark as Erebus:  let…

“Music is the art of the prophets” Martin Luther (1483-1546)  Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that calms the agitations of the soul.  Martin Luther is most remembered as a founder of the Protestant Reformation. His…

“When it sounds good, it IS good.” Duke Ellington (1899-1974) “Somehow, I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself—he’d appreciate the combination of team spirit and informality, of academic knowledge and humor, of…

Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it.  Plato  (428/427BC or 424/423BC – 348/347BC) Quoted at https://learningwithmusic.weebly.com/index.html  Plato’s name is familiar…