The Quotations Archive currently contains 1744 quotations.

Music

A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.

-- Anonymous

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

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

-- Samuel Butler

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

-- G. K. Chesterton

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

-- George Clemenceau

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.

-- Jules Combarieu

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."

-- Aaron Copland

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

-- Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962

This compact disc is made from analog masters recorded without noise reduction. Half the tracks, in fact, were recorded in a dismal, cheap basement eight-track studio with puddles of water on the floor. Digital technology will now faithfully reproduce these noisy, low-fi, un-professional masters at great expense. feel stupid yet?

-- Disclaimer on a CD

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

-- Robert Frost

Cute little babies that fall out of swings - These are a few of my favourite things.

-- Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from "The Sound of Music"

If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly.

-- Gustav Holst, on amateur music-making

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

-- Aldous Huxley

Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

-- H. L. Mencken

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

-- Michel de Montaigne

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

-- Elvis Presley

Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, Existence is simply illusion.

-- Fred Rogers, parody of "Row, row, row your boat" on his television show, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.

-- Richard Strauss, on conducting

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

-- Igor Stravinsky

"These are days you'll remember." If you recall nothing else from your graduation ceremony, remember you heard the New Jersey Governor quote from 10,000 Maniacs.

-- Christine Todd, NJ Governor, Wheaton College Graduation, 1995

Assassins!

-- Arturo Toscanini, to his orchestra

Anything too stupid to be said, is sung.

-- Voltaire

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

-- Oscar Wilde

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

-- Oscar Wilde

Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

-- Frank Zappa

2,400,000 Americans play the accordian - hopefully not at the same time.

-- inside of a Pepsi cap