music
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘music’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“I wanted to take up music, so my father bought me a blunt instrument. He told me to knock myself out.” -Jay London
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“Music is about communication… it isn’t just something that maybe physically sounds good or orally sounds interesting it’s something far, far deeper than that.” -Evelyn Glennie
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“My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, ‘Hear me clap, hear the music.’ I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.” -Danica McKellar
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“We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters.” -Eddie Van Halen
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“I like music that’s more offensive. I like it to sound like nails on a blackboard, get me wild.” -Iggy Pop
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“People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.” -Paul Hindemith
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“As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.” -Julie Andrews
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“Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.” -Robert Fripp
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“Country music is three chords and the truth.” -Harlan Howard
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“In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod, I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven’t listened to in years.” -Susan Orlean
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“The bottom line is that musicians love to make music and always will.” -Jennifer Lopez
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“Nature’s music is never over her silences are pauses, not conclusions.” -Mary Webb
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“In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.” -Roy H. Williams
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“I haven’t heard any music on the BBC World Service in a long time. Maybe I’m listening at the wrong times. But not one single piece of music.” -Aung San Suu Kyi
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“I’m not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it’s just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There’s a lot of people who are committed to – soulfully.” -Jerry Garcia
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“I listen to music for emotion and I get zero emotion from rap.” -Sebastian Bach
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“Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?” -Camille Paglia
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“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.” -Lawrence Durrell
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“Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully – love, lust, longing joy, rage, fear triumph, yearning and confusion.” -Tony Snow
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“Every so often, I feel I should graduate to classical music, properly. But the truth is, I’m more likely to listen to rock music.” -Tony Blair
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“I think the world is ready for some rock ‘n’ roll. Some real time guys that play their own instruments, write their own songs, and sing the music and have a good time doing it.” -Vince Neil
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“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.” -Milan Kundera
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“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?” -John Cusack
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“For me, music and life are all about style.” -Miles Davis
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“Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts – as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.” -Herbert Spencer
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“I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.” -Steve Hackett
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“Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.” -Ludwig van Beethoven
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“Music is part of the life of fashion, too.” -Karl Lagerfeld
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“Singing is a way of releasing an emotion that you sometimes can’t portray when you’re acting. And music moves your soul, so music is the source of the most intense emotions you can feel.” -Amanda Seyfried
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“There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.” -David Byrne
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“My music must reflect whatever’s going on in my mind, and my life needs to evolve for me to discover who it is I’m becoming.” -Shania Twain
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“I supply the music for Vampires, which is a new series that’s coming out.” -John Entwistle
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“Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn’t know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood…
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“I start really missing London when I go away. I have a little flat, but very central. I live above a pub and you’d think it’d be a nightmare, but I like hearing the music and it’s quite comforting.” -Ellie Goulding
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“I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.” -David Hockney
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“Even from a listening end now, I’m still completely a fan of music.” -James Iha
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“I think I’m a music fan before anything else.” -Nuno Bettencourt
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“I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.” -Willie Nelson
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“We used to play music for fun. Much more than now. Now nobody picks up a guitar unless they’re paid for it.” -Leonard Cohen
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“Music of all arts should be expansive and inclusive.” -Jesse Jackson
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“I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!” -LeBron James
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“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.” -Ravi Shankar
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“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.” -W. H. Auden
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“Oh, I will always be honest with my music. The records are black boxes for me. Like if you want to know who I am, my views, my perspective, things I love, things I hate, my convictions, my anthems. I’ve never let people’s opinions affect the way I write.” -Katy Perry
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“To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.” -Henri Frederic…
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“To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it’s a good, earned feeling now.” -Billy Corgan
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“Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities… much more so than music or language.” -Conrad Hall
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“Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.” -Robert Fulghum
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“I love jazz music and sad music. I’m a sentimental guy. I’m a romantic guy.” -Fred Durst
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“The only love affair I have ever had was with music.” -Maurice Ravel
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“There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“If anyone asks you what kind of music you play, tell him ‘pop.’ Don’t tell him ‘rock’n’roll’ or they won’t even let you in the hotel.” -Buddy Holly
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“I dabbled in things like Howlin’ Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I’d been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.” -Jack White
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“There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.” -Jim Davis
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“The business side of film has goofed up so many things, but even that’s changing. It happened to the music industry and now it’s happening to the film studios. It’s crazy what’s going on. But artists should have control of their work especially if, as I always say, you never turn down a good idea…
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“I travel the garden of music, thru inspiration. It’s a large, very large garden, seen?” -Peter Tosh
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“I’ve seen country music go uptown, like we say, and I’m proud I was there when it happened.” -Loretta Lynn
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“It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.” -Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.” -Brian Eno
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“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.” -Denis Diderot
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“Music is always a reflection of what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.” -Tori Amos
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“I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.” -Peter Ustinov
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“We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of the dream.” -Arthur O’Shaughnessy
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“Rap music’s been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn’t.” -Alexander McQueen
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“What we don’t need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn’t.” -Charley Pride
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“I suppose that by being absent from the music business, it appeared that I just dropped out, but really I never did. I was continuously working and doing various things.” -Cat Stevens
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“I turned to music originally because of my past and needing a release or an outlet to get out anger or frustration or hurt.” -Christina Aguilera
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“The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.” -Martin Scorsese
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“I was never too keen on the British music press. They’ve called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn’t write our own songs.” -Freddie Mercury
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“My parents started with very little and were the only ones in their families to graduate from college. As parents, they focused on education, but did not stop at academics – they made sure that we knew music, saw art and theatre and traveled – even though it meant budgeting like crazy.” -Jennifer Garner
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“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.” -John Erskine
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“Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate all that was once so beautiful is dead.” -Conrad Aiken
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“That’s why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.” -Corita Kent
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“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
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“I like to comprehend more or less everything around me – apart from the creation of my music. It’s an obsessive character trait that’s getting worse. I don’t switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something’s going wrong.” -Robert Plant
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“The spiral in a snail’s shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It’s the same ratio that you’ll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.” -Joseph Gordon-Levitt
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“City people live the city. We live in L.A., New York, we live in places where it’s chaotic and you never know what’s gonna happen. And that’s the music – you never know what’s gonna happen.” -Alice Cooper
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“That was a time when I did love music, I couldn’t get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right – and non-commercial – had become so influential, so immediately.” -Marc Jacobs
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“You can’t fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.” -Etta James
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“The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.” -Roy Ayers
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“My aim is just to make good music every single time.” -Lil Wayne
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“I think one of my favorite things to do is just lock myself up in a small room and listen to music and watch films for a day. Also I just like seeing my friends. We have pizza parties which means I get four friends round, we eat a pizza and we’re really lazy and…
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“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” -Marcel Marceau
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“Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.” -Hector Berlioz
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“Please write music like Wagner, only louder.” -Samuel Goldwyn
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“Yeah, I’ve been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.” -Jeff Bridges
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“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
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“Country fans need to support country music by buying albums and concert tickets for traditional artists or the music will just fade away. And that would be really sad.” -George Jones
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“The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.” -Havelock Ellis
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“Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.” -Luciano Pavarotti
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“I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.” -Salma Hayek
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“The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.” -George Lucas
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“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.” -Paracelsus
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“Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool.” -Brian Molko
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“As a boy, I’d always had an interest in theater. But the idea at my school was that drama and music were to round out the man. It wasn’t what one did for a living. I got over that.” -Hugh Jackman
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“I don’t have any real spirituality in my life – I’m kind of an atheist – but when music can take me to the highest heights, it’s almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.” -Jack Black
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“What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.” -Walter Savage Landor
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“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.” -Zhuangzi
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“Music will always be a part of my life. I love music and I don’t care how many units I sell.” -Alanis Morissette
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“Music is a great energizer. It’s a language everybody knows.” -Bill Hicks
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“Music has always been my back door to life. It is important for people to find something that excites them. I like the concept that if you do what excites you, you will be rewarded generously, whatever form reward takes, which is not necessarily money.” -Brandon Boyd
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“I’m not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing it makes you feel like an idiot.” -Manuel Puig
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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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“All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don’t subscribe to any of that. It’s all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who’s to say what is and isn’t a certain…
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“I doubt I’ll be singing forever, because at some point people aren’t going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I’ll still get the opportunity to write songs.” -Adele
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“You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.” -Keith Richards
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“When people in stadiums do the Wave, it’s the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.” -Jerry Saltz
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“Music is the soundtrack to the crappy movie that is my life.” -Chris Rock
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“Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.” -Avril Lavigne
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“I am severely distracted these days. It’s hard to sit in front of the computer, uploading bad music for hours, when you have a wonderful boyfriend who treats you like a Goddess.” -April Winchell
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“I’m well past the age where I’m acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You’re not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you’re not going to get played on radio and you’re not going to get played on television. I have to…
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“I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?” -Dave Grohl
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“Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.” -Alan Rickman
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“Christianity helps us face the music even when we don’t like the tune.” -Phillips Brooks
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“I’ll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I’ll never stop my music.” -George Harrison
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“A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.” -Leopold Stokowski
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“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.” -Ezra Pound
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“It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music. When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ I thought, this is it.” -Paul McCartney
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“At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.” -Satyajit Ray
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“Music was important. Football was the easy part.” -Zinedine Zidane
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“I like pop music. I consider rock ‘n’ roll to be a branch of pop music.” -Tom Stoppard
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“If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil…
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“If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.” -Mencius
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“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” -George Byron
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“If I hadn’t of had music in my life, it’s quite possible I’d be dead and I’d much rather be alive.” -James Hetfield
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“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” -Pythagoras
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“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.” -Emile M. Cioran
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“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.” -Leonard Bernstein
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“There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.” -Louis Armstrong
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“When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley
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“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.” -Vladimir Nabokov
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“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.” -Warren G. Bennis
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“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” -Ingmar Bergman
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“I think older people can appreciate my music because I really show my heart when I sing, and it’s not corny. I think I can grow as an artist, and my fans will grow with me.” -Justin Bieber
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“What I know is my music gets blamed for school shootings.” -Marilyn Manson
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“I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.” -Steve Martin
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“I’m a big collector of vinyl – I have a record room in my house – and I’ve always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I’m writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into…
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“The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.” -Stendhal
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“I get bored easily, so I need to do a lot. I’ve started a record label, so I get to nurture new talent and talk about music, which is a passion of mine. I’ve written another book. And I get to come to work and do the TV show, which is always really fun.” -Ellen…
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“Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.” -Ronnie James Dio
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“Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.” -Andres Segovia
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“The world’s a better place since I chose music.” -Henry Rollins
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“When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.” -Maria Callas
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“Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable.” -Grace Slick
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“But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.” -E. O. Wilson
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“A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that’s when cuisine is truly exciting.” -Charlie Trotter
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“When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I’d discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater.” -Morgan Freeman
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“I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It’s true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.” -Mick Jagger
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“You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you’re got music.” -Sid Vicious
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“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.” -George Santayana
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“Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.” -Joseph Addison
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“Rock n’ Roll came from the slaves singing gospel in the fields. Their lives were hell and they used music to lift out of it, to take them away. That’s what rock n’ roll should do – take you to a better place.” -Meat Loaf
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“Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.” -Henry Miller
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“Stone walls confine a tinker cold iron binds a witch but a musician’s music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.” -Charles de Lint
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“Music is the best way for me to say I love you.” -Mireille Mathieu
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“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” -Jimmy Carter
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“The bass, no matter what kind of music you’re playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.” -Charlie Haden
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“I’m a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There’s others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there’s another type that’s not a visual thinker at all, and they’re the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather…
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“I think the drummer should sit back there and play some drums, and never mind about the tunes. Just get up there and wail behind whoever is sitting up there playing the solo. And this is what is lacking, definitely lacking in music today.” -Buddy Rich
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“Music is a fantastic peacekeeper of the world, it is integral to harmony, and it is a required fundamental of human emotion.” -Xun Zi
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“Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.” -Diogenes
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“There is nothing stable in the world uproar’s your only music.” -John Keats
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“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.” -Van Morrison
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“It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.” -Samuel Butler
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“Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.” -Samuel Johnson
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“Music should probably provide answers in terms of lyrical content, and giving people a sense of togetherness and oneness, as opposed to being alone in their thoughts and dilemmas or regrets or happiness or whatever.” -Peabo Bryson
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