music

1.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

- Levi-Strauss, Claude

2.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

- Williams, Tennessee

3.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

- Hawthorne, Nathaniel

4.

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

5.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

- Dan Rather

6.

When words leave off, music begins.

- Thomas Carlyle

7.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

- Edgar Wilson Nye

8.

The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music... Bodies never lie.

- Agnes De Mille

9.

Music lives in three tenses at once. Developing what comes before it in the past, it engages us in the present, and inspires our hopes for its future.

- Warren Benson

10.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

- Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

11.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

- George Bernard Shaw

13.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

- Woody Allen

14.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

- George Eliot

15.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

- Beecham, Sir Thomas

16.

The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of the face; true proportions, the beauty of architecture; true measures, the beauty of harmony and music.

- Shaftesbury, Lord

17.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

- Proverb, Zimbabwe

18.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

- George Bernard Shaw

19.

Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that crap and just play.

- Charlie Parker

20.

Rock music should be gross: that's the fun of it. It gets up and drops its trousers.

- Dickinson, Bruce