Quotations about Music and Piano

PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. ~Ambrose Bierce

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country. ~Edmund G. Brown

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

There is no truer truth obtainable by Man than comes of music.
~Robert Browning

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

Quotations about Music and piano - C


If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~John Cage
The public is like a piano. You just have to know what keys to poke. ~Al Capp

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrap pages and hulls! ~Thomas Carlyle

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. ~Thomas Carlyle, Essays, "The Opera"

He who sings scares away his woes. ~Cervantes

[An intellectual] is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger. ~John Chesson

An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts. ~Kit Coleman, Kit Coleman: Queen of Hearts

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable ~ Aaron Copland

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitched the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touched within us, and the heart replies.
~William Cowper

Quotations about music and piano - D


What we provide is an atmosphere... of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I've seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell. ~Meyer Davis, about his orchestra

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de La Prade

A piano store looks like a funeral parlor for music. ~ Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Music is an outburst of the soul. ~Frederick Delius

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. ~Joan Didion

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. ~Ani Difrenceo

No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. ~W.H. Auden, Time, 29 December 1961
Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

What passion cannot music raise and quell! ~John Dryden

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Quotations about music and Piano - E


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

You are the music while the music lasts. ~T.S. Eliot

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotations about music and Piano - F


The pause is as important as the note. ~Truman Fisher

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. ~Zelda Fitzgerald (Wife of American short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Quotations about music and Piano - G


I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in and the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge. ~William Gaddis

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker. ~William Green

Quotations about music and Piano - H


Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought. ~E. Y. Harburg

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. ~Bob Hope

Country music is three chords and the truth. ~Harlan Howard

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs. ~Robert Hughes

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart. ~Leigh Hunt

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

Quotations about music and Piano - I


Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it? ~Charles Ives

It's not a bloody piano, it's a clarenARt...you weird talking person. ~Eddie Izzard

Quotations about music and Piano - J


Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged. ~Billy Joel
Quotations about music and Piano - K


A lawyer's relationship to justice and wisdom is on a par with a piano tuner's relationship to a concert. He neither composes the music, nor interprets it-he merely keeps the machinery running. ~Lucille Kallen

Quotations about music and Piano - L


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

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic. ~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. ~Michael Levine

My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle. ~Liberace

It won't be long before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there. ~Frederick Loewe

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. ~Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. ~Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

Quotations about music and Piano - M


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

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music. ~Marcel Marceau

Modern music is as dangerous as cocaine. ~Pietro Mascagni

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world. ~Giuseppe Mazzini

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. ~Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard, Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors, 1923

If the King loves music, it is well with the land. ~Mencius

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

The piano's world encompasses glass-nerved virtuosi and stomping barrel-housers in fedoras; it is a world of pasture and storm, of perfumed smoke, of liquid mathematics. ~Kenneth Miller

No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery. ~Kenneth Miller

The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air. ~Kennteh Miller

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music. ~ Angela Monet

Get up from that piano. You're hurtin' its feelings. ~ Jelly Roll Morton

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates. Malcolm Muggeridge

Quotations about music and Piano - N

In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Quotations about music and Piano - O


I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality. ~H.A. Overstreet

Quotations about music and Piano - P


Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. ~Charlie Parker

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives meaning to our life on this unavailing star. ~Logan Pearsall

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. ~Ezra Pound

Quotations about music and Piano - R


Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. ~Sergei Rachmaninov

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong. ~Simon Rattle

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

Truly to sing, that is a different breath. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Quotations about music and Piano - S


The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief. ~S.A. Sachs

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

When I don't like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely. ~Florent Schmitt

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. ~Andre Segovia

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, for one another, though dissimilar? ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die -
Vibrates in the memory
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

That's it, from now on I'm not looking forward to anything! Oh my god! Tomorrow there's a two for one sale on piano benches. I can't wait, ooh, ooh, ooh ~Homer Simpson

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth. Sydney Smith

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading. ~Igor Stravinsky

Quotations about music and Piano - T


Music fills the infinite between two souls. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Music that gentler on the spirit lies, than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson

The city is built to music,
Therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever.
~Alfred Lord Tennyson

I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down. ~ Virgil Thomson

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

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. ~Henry David Thoreau

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. ~Harry S Truman

Quotations about music and Piano - W

The piano has been drinking, not me. ~Tom Waits

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~Helmut Walcha

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have ~ Edgar Watson

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. ~James Whistler

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. ~Oscar Wilde

They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. ~Oscar Wilde

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

...where music dwells
Lingering - and wandering on as loath to die...
~William Wordsworth, "Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge"

Quotations about music and piano - Z


Slap some keys on her and we'll have a piano. ~Daryl F. Zanuck

As time goes by I'm going to put here new quotations about music and piano so stay tuned :)