Play the music, not the instrument. – Author Unknown
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. – Ludwig van Beethoven
Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. – Robert Fripp
[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the “William Tell Overture” without thinking of the Lone Ranger. – John Chesson
Music is the universal language of mankind. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. – Ezra Pound
He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. – Robert Browning
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. – Victor Hugo
Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. – Buffy Sainte-Marie
Music is an outburst of the soul. – Frederick Delius
Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. – Oscar Wilde
In music the passions enjoy themselves. – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
Music is what life sounds like. – Eric Olson
Music is lyrical literature… – Stendhal (tr. Coe), paraphrased, 1824
If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. – John Cage
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. – Arnold Bennett
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. – Robert G. Ingersoll
Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. – Alphonse de Lamartine
When words leave off, music begins. – Heinrich Heine
Truly to sing, that is a different breath. – Rainer Maria Rilke
