Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

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.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

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

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

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

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says "I want to do this song of yours" because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

The high note is not the only thing.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

You are the music while the music lasts.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Your talking to someone who really understands rock music.

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

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

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

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

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.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

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

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got "Backstreet." We put "Boys" on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Music should never be harmless.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.