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Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?
-William Shakespeare
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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
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Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.
-Frank Sinatra
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Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
-John Philip Sousa
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Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual language, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.
-Sigmund Spaeth
The Art of Enjoying Music, McGraw-Hill, 1933
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Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.
-Baruch (_Benedict de) Spinoza
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The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.
-George Steiner
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I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
-Henri B. Stendhal
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They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
-Wallace Stevens
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The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
-Igor Stravinsky
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Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
-Igor Stravinsky
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A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
-Igor Stravinsky
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Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.
-George Szell
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The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.
-Jeffrey Tate
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I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.
-James Taylor
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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
-Lewis Thomas
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The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Music is the shorthand of emotion.
-Leo Tolstoy
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There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.
-Mark Twain
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We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
-Rebecca West
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Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.
-Paul Whiteman
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Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
-Oscar Wilde
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Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
-Oscar Wilde
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Books about Music
