Classic Music Quotes

• Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Jazz And Life, Boundaries

  "Bird: the legend of Charlie Parker". Book by Robert George Reisner, p. 27, 1977.

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• Where words fail, music speaks.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Inspirational, Music, Art

  Hans Christian Andersen (1876). “Stories for the Young”

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• Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wisdom, Philosophy

  Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Kerst, Henry Edward Krehbiel (1964). “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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  Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

  Steve Martin

  Funny, Music, Dance

  66 Copy quote

• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

  Pablo Picasso

  Life, Motivational, Music

  "LIFE", Vol. 57, nr. 11, (p. 9), September 11, 1964.

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• I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

  Elvis Presley

  Music, Witty, Humorous

  Quoted in Robert Byrne, The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1984)

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• If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Reality

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

  Louis Armstrong

  Funny, Music, Song

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 7 July 1971

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• Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Music, Ocean, Blessed

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• Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

  George Szell

  Music, Giving, Jazz And Life

  Newsweek 28 Jan. 1963

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• To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Mean, Play

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• Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

  Nina Simone

  Music, White, Racism

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Men

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

  Ernest Newman

  Music, Found, Composer

  18 Copy quote
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  Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Men

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

  T. S. Eliot

  Inspirational, Music, Fear

  32 Copy quote

• I've outdone anyone you can name - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

  James Brown

  Music, Names, Tunes

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• The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth.

  Andres Segovia

  Music, Piano, Monsters

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• Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

  Noel Coward

  Music, Work, Extraordinary

  'Private Lives' (1930) act 1

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• Man, there's no boundary line to art!

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Men

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

  Ahmad Jamal

  Music, Artist, Europe

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• A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

  Charles Rosen

  Art, Decision, Attention

  Charles Rosen (2002). “Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

  Victor Hugo

  Music, Sound And Music, Musical Life

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• Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?

  Michael Torke

  Funny, Music, Listening

  65 Copy quote

• If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

  Gustav Mahler

  Funny, Music, Expression

  Letter to Max Marschalk, March 26, 1896.

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