Classical Music Quotes

• 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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• 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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• Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.

  Victor Hugo

  Music, Sound And Music, Musical Life

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• 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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• Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

  Kin Hubbard

  Music, Thinking, Tunes

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• I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

  Nina Simone

  Freedom, Years, Excellence

  "Nina Simone and the problem with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" by Hanif Abdurraqib, ew.com. April 12, 2018.

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• Music is the shorthand of emotion.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Music, Emotion, Shorthand

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• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

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• A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

  Leopold Stokowski

  Inspirational, Music, Art

  Leopold Stokowski's address to an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times, May 11, 1967.

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• Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

  Claude Debussy

  Art, Musician, Composing

  "Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought". Book by John Paynter, 1992.

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• Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

  Frederic Chopin

  Music, Art, Simple

  "If Not God, Then What? Neuroscience, Aesthetics, and the Origins of the Transcendent". Book by Joshua Fost (p. 93), November 16, 2007.

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• Classical music and pop are two different universes, each with its own difficulties, peculiarities, depth and artistic dignity. In Italy, I think there is a fairly clear line of demarcation, but the history of music is full of fusion. Popular and classical music have always found points of contact, of crossing, exchange, both drawing mutual profit.

  Andrea Bocelli

  Thinking, Two, Different Universes

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  Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

  Steve Martin

  Funny, Music, Dance

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• You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket)

  Oscar Levant

  Music, Trying, Movement

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• They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

  Edgar Wilson Nye

  Music, Sound, Opera

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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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• The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

  Andre Previn

  Music, Differences, Important

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• When I was younger, studying classical music, I really had to put in the time. Three hours a day is not even nice - you have to put in six.

  Alicia Keys

  Nice, Six, Three

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• When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

  Moby

  Rocks, Guitar, Years

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• I have never learned to read or write music so I am not a virtuoso musician like the others you mentioned. I am completely unable to play like them because I never learned classical music, I just developed my own crazy style!

  Ken Hensley

  Crazy, Writing, Play

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• There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can't do it in five minutes. You can't listen to 'The Rite of Spring' once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.

  Penn Jillette

  Spring, Arrogance, Looks

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

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• The only love affair I have ever had was with music.

  Maurice Ravel

  Love, Inspiring, Affair

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• What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

  Gustav Mahler

  Musical, Notes, Found

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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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• Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

  Giacomo Puccini

  Inspiring, Art, Inspiration

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