Music Quotes

It's not like one can buy your way to being a rock star. There's lot's of great things in life that you can make money and you can earn great pleasures and you can "oh I want to go on holiday here or there." You can't just buy that privilege of performing to tens of thousands of people every night.

So it was very difficult to give up, but by the end I was so spiritually worn out by it that it really didn't seem tenable for my own soul to stay. So I decided to retract the apology. I understood how damaging that might be to my bandmates. That was made clear to me, so the only tenable thing for me to do was also to leave the band so that they wouldn't get pulled under with me. And since then, having made that sacrifice, I decided I'm going to speak out, I'm going to say what I think, and my life's all the better for it.

The thing about Deford Bailey, Ray Charles, and Charlie Pride, the two or three black people who were known to be in country music. They were accepted. The musicians accepted them at a time when the culture did not accept. There's a truth in the music. And it's too bad that we, as a culture, have not been able to address that truth. That's the shame of it. The art tells more of the tale of us coming together.

Louis Armstrong's overwhelming message is one of love. Really, when you hear his music, it's of joy. His music is so joyous. He was just not going to be defeated by the forces of life. And these forces visit all of us. My great-great-grandmother used to say that life has a board for every behind. And there's a board just fit to yours. Your board is not going to work on someone else's behind. And when it's your turn your going to come up and that paddle is going to be put on your booty and it's going to hurt as bad as it can hurt. And Louis Armstrong is there to tell you after you get that paddlin'... "It's alright son!"

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music.

I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.

The combination of a simple gospel truth with an appealing melody is one of the greatest teachers we will ever have.

We need to accept and document the differences in how other cultures hear the world. The opportunities to do so are rapidly diminishing with the diffusion of Western music around the world, and I think we need to seize the opportunity to do as much as we can before the window closes.

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water.

Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.

So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence."

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.