Quotes about music

When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...

As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in the love song—is the best courtship of all.

Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life/

To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

Life, he realized, was much like a song.

In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.

[S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole.

A harp can be as dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.

We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

Somehow the singing made the miles seem shorter.

There are worse things than dying with a song on your lips.

I only sing the songs that better men have made.

Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it's sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.