90 Powerful Music Quotes That Will Inspire You
Updated: Mar. 31, 2024
These impactful music quotes from singers, songwriters, poets and composers are sure to get you dusting off your digital record collection
Music quotes highlighting the power of song
In today’s world of streaming platforms and concert spectacles, it can be easy to think of music solely from a numbers perspective. Shows have become bigger and more complex, while songs generate more streams, and therefore more money, than ever before. But really, at its core, music transcends numbers. It is a universal language, shared by every culture and clan. From love ballads made for slow-dancing to upbeat songs that keep us company while cleaning, music provides us with a soundtrack to all life’s moments; music quotes call to mind events both big and small.
As a music journalist, I’m lucky that I get to write about something that I love. But what makes it even better is that music is a love shared by all, something made evident by just how many people have come up with something truly beautiful to say about it. I mean, I’m not a big fan of country music, but these Dolly Parton quotes might just convert me. And Ms. Parton is far from the only one with something to say on the matter.
From musicians to philosophers to poets, there are so many great music quotes that capture just how important music is to our lives. So without further ado, here are 90 powerful music quotes to inspire your 2024 playlists and keep you dancing through the rest of the year.
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The best music quotes
Poignant and poetic, these profound music quotes capture the many ways music can move us and the important role it plays in our lives.
1. “Music has the capacity for acting as a vehicle for the impossible to enter our world.” —Robert Fripp
2. “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” —Confucius
3. “I try and sing about a real human experience and emotion—because if it was real for me, it would strike a real chord in someone else.” —Cyndi Lauper
4. “If music be the food of love, play on.” —William Shakespeare
5. “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” —Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems
6. “Music … can name the unnameable, and communicate the unknowable.” —Leonard Bernstein
7. “Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.” —Oliver Sacks
8. “Everything in the universe has a rhythm.” —Maya Angelou
9. “Music is closely intertwined with the life of every race. We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.” —Frances Densmore, The American Indians and Their Music
10. “Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.” —George Eliot
11. “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” —Miles Davis
12. “Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.” —Louis Armstrong
13. “A bird doesn’t sing because he has an answer—he sings because he has a song.” —Joan Walsh Anglund
14. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” —Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays
15. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
16. “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.” —Igor Stravinsky
17. “We are a music-making species—always have been, always will be—and music’s capacity to explore, express and address what it is to be human remains one of our greatest communal gifts.” —Clemency Burton Hill, Year of Wonder
18. “My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us! The world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.” —Edward Elgar
19. “Which of the two powers, Love or Music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? It is a problem, and yet it seems to me that this is the answer: ‘Love can give no idea of music; music can give an idea of love.’ Why separate them? They are two wings of the soul.” —Hector Berlioz
20. “Good music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty.” —Thomas Beecham
Short music quotes
Sometimes, the fewer the words, the more powerful the message. These life-changing quotes about music epitomize that philosophy, encompassing the complex nature of music in a short sentence.
21. “Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” —Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
22. “Music begins where language ends.” —Henry Russell Cleveland
23. “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” —Ludwig van Beethoven
24. “Why do so many of us constantly try to explain the beauty of music, thus apparently depriving it of its mystery?” —Leonard Bernstein, “The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard”
25. “You just pick a chord, go twang and you’ve got music.” —Sid Vicious
26. “Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.” —Robert Fripp
27. “Or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” —T.S. Eliot
28. “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live, it won’t come out of your horn.” —Charlie Parker
29. “I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” —Albert Einstein
30. “Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.” —William Congreve, The Mourning Bride
31. “Without music, life would be a mistake.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
32. “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” —Arthur O’Shaughnessy
33. “Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes also a sort of spirit, and never dies.” —Edward Bulwer-Lytton
34. “Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.” —Robert Browning
35. “Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.” —Alphonse de Lamartine
36. “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” —Leonard Cohen
37. “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music.” —Mark Strand, Collected Poems of Mark Strand
38. “Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below.” —Joseph Addison
Inspirational music quotes
One of the best things about music is its ability to uplift. Like the motivational quotes about life you’ll find all over the internet, these music quotes will leave you feeling inspired and ready to lose yourself in your favorite song.
39. “Though music be a universal language, it is spoken with all sorts of accents.” —George Bernard Shaw
40. “Music is the universal language of mankind.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
41. “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” —E.Y. Harburg
42. “I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, since it came first in man’s experience and history. But since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.” —William Faulkner
43. “Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.” —Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke”
44. “The language of music is common to all generations and nations. It is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.” —Gioachino Rossini
45. “Music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.” —Irene Nemirovsky
46. “Art is not national. It is international. Music is not written in red, white and blue; it is written with the heart’s blood of the composer.” —Nellie Melba
47. “Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.” —Robert G. Ingersoll
48. “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts—it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure—and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.” —Susan Sontag
49. “But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.” —Charles Ives
50. “Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
51. “Music is love in search of a word.” —Sidney Lanier
52. “I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school.” —Rosanne Cash, Composed: A Memoir
53. “The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs they have sung for a thousand years. The hills fill my heart with the sound of music. My heart wants to sing ev’ry song it hears.” —Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music
54. “Music washes away from the soul, the dust of every day life.” —Berthold Auerbach, Auf der Höhe (On the Heights)
55. “Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own.” —Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Country music quotes
Country music is a genre that prides itself on down-home roots and authenticity (with some patriotism thrown in for good measure). So it should come as no surprise that these country music quotes are chock-full of hard-earned wisdom.
56. “Country music is three chords and the truth.” —Harlan Howard
57. “We have that storytelling history in country and bluegrass and old time and folk music, blues—all those things that combine to make up the genre. It was probably storytelling before it was songwriting, as far as country music is concerned.” —Chris Stapleton
58. “I think country music is popular—has been popular and will always be popular—because I think [it’s] a lot of real people singing about a lot of real stuff about real people. And it’s simple enough for people to understand it. And we kind of roll with the punches.” —Dolly Parton
59. “Only in country music can you compare an old pickup truck and an old guitar to your wife and turn it into a love song. … Thank God for country music.” —Dierks Bentley
60. “To me, country music has always been the home for a great song.” —Zac Brown
61. “A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth—that’s what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.” —Willie Nelson
62. “I’ll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.” —Dwight Yoakam
63. “My kind of country is the clear, pure, old-fashioned kind, emotional and gutsy and also sentimental. The songs tell about real human problems—love and the pain of heartbreak and loss—in a way that shows you that the singer is no stranger to pain, and is tough enough to suffer and survive.” —Reba McEntire, Reba: My Story
64. “Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There’s a connection because there’s a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.” —Hunter Hayes
65. “I was always sort of mystified and excited about the world of country music. Something about it struck me as enchanted.” —Grace Potter
66. “I didn’t choose country. Country chose me.” —Mickey Guyton
67. “I think it speaks to our basic fundamental feelings, you know. Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.” —Johnny Cash
68. “Punk rock is a dedication to disobedience, and at its core, that’s what country music is and was.” —Shannon McNally
69. “To me a good song is one that I can remember after hearing it once. It’s melody and a succinct communication of a nuanced thought that is simultaneously universal.” —Shannon McNally
70. “Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.” —Brad Paisley
Funny music quotes
While music can easily move us to tears, it doesn’t always have to be so serious. There are plenty of funny songs that lift our mood and leave us cackling. These funny music quotes revel in the lighter side of the art form and the artists we know and love.
71. “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.” —Louis Armstrong
72. “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” —Anonymous
73. “To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.” —Igor Stravinsky
74. “In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.” —Robert Schumann
75. “The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.” —Arthur Honegger
76. “I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.” —Arnold Schoenberg
77. “A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” —Frank Zappa
78. “There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.” —Thomas Beecham
79. “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer to that would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.'” —Aaron Copland
80. “If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music, people don’t talk.” —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
81. “I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.” —Ella Fitzgerald
82. “Jazz will endure, just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.” —John Philip Sousa
83. “Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.” —George Bernard Shaw
84. “All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.” —Frank Zappa
85. “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” —Noël Coward
86. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” —Martin Mull
87. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve suffered for my music, now it’s your turn.” —Neil Innes
88. “There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.” —Louis Armstrong
89. “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” —Bob Marley
90. “He was an average guy who could carry a tune.” —Bing Crosby, on his epitaph
Originally Published: February 07, 2024
