Music Quote Collection

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche,

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
― Bob Marley

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor hugo

 

"Shutup and play your horn"
-Miles Davis

"I never play the same thing once"
-Dizzy Gillespie

"If you don't live it, then it won't come out of your horn..."
- Charlie Parker

"I pay no attention to anyone's praise or blame..."
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy"
- Ludwig Beethoven

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best..."
- Duke Ellington

"You can play a shoestring if you're sincere..."
- John Coltrane.

“I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money it is not really an artistic decision. It is a business decision"
- Frank Zappa (sic)

 

"The secret to some of my tone is this "Fantastik" here. It cleans some of the funky feedback issues that i was having, because it's anti-bacterial or something, i don't know if you noticed."
-Eric johnson

 

"Two quid? Two quid for one bloody sausage?"
- Den Dennis - Bad News 1982

 

"I've got blisters on me fingers."

John Lennon

 

That's not exactly music related but it fits:
"if you can remember the 70s, you weren't really there"

 

A quote I keep telling artists people who want to sound like this or that band or artist:

If you want to sound like Rammstein, you got to be Rammstein.
- source unknown

 

I've seen that in someone's sig. If I only could remember who it was.

 

Research has revealed it was Ringo who said it, not John.

 

one of my all-time favorites...

 

Music... is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing -- Bill Shakespeare

Ok, it was actually life, not music, but it kind of all goes together.

 

‘In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.’
- Steve Lacy

‘It created a lot of space and a lot of tension, because everybody had to be incredibly alert and trust their ears. And I think that’s maybe why I loved that music as much as I did, because it seemed very alert and very sensual and very unwritten’.
- Joni Mitchell

Jazz is like a very generous family with a big house that has lots of guests from all over. Every so often, a visitor is particularly illuminating and affects the viewpoint of jazz permanently, leaving something behind in the house that will stay there forever’
– Brad Meldau

 

Unfortunately being a musician is not a job. Musicians are poor. They spend their lives in music and hope get rich someday but usually that doesn't happen. It is what it is.

 

The world's most famous and popular language is music.
- Psy

I don't make music for eyes. I make music for ears.
- Adele

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.
- Nat King Cole

 

Dieter Bohlen, german juror to a singer at an audition:
"Your performance started very weak, but in return it slackened very strong!"

 

This one can't be missing:
It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.
- Miles Davis

 

You can tune a guitar, you can Tuna fish, but never fucking tune your vocals.

Lois Lane

 

Well it's certainly well known that Ringo did have the best blisters in the beatles...

no, wait a mo, I think that might have been something about drumming and the beatles...
it's just so hard to remember the 60s.

 

"Art is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" - Cesar A. Cruz

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” - Hunter S. Thompson

"Time is still the best critic, and patience the best teacher." - Frederic Chopin

"Our age seeks many things. What it has found, however, is above all: comfort. Comfort, with all its implications, intrudes even into the world of ideas and makes us far more content than we should ever be. We understand today better than ever how to make life pleasant. We solve problems to remove an unpleasantness. But how do we solve them? And what presumption, even to think we have really solved them!
Here we can see most distinctly what theprerequisite of comfort is: superficiality. It is thus easy to have a 'Worldview', a 'philosophy', if one contemplates only what is pleasant and gives no heed to the rest. The rest - which is just what matters most."
- Schönberg in the Preface of "Theory of Harmony"

Another Schönberg quote, this time in German: "Kunst kommt nicht von können, sondern von Müssen"



"it's not the tools that make the professional - it's the paycheck"

"music is not a career, its a lottery"

As much as I hate that moron, one quote is legendary: What's the difference between your voice and a bucket of shit? The bucket.

 

“People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.”
“I had to say to myself, 'Don't write the music. Let the music write itself.”
“Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?”
“Music is color blind.”
“Stop this agony of wishing Play it out Don't think, don't hesitate Curving back within yourself Just create... Just create”
“You can’t do your best when you’re doubting yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?”
― Michael Jackson