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Music

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

W. H. Auden

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

Berthold Auerbach

As to what happens when I compose, I really haven't the faintest idea.

Samuel Barber

Music is a greater revelation than the whole of wisdom and philosophy.

Ludwig von Beethoven

It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.

Johannes Brahms

Music was born free, and to win freedom is its destiny.

Ferruccio Busoni

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it had missed the point.

Maria Callas (Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos)

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.

Claude Debussy

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

Mozart is the human incarnation of the divine force of creation.

Johann W. von Geothe

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

Jascha Heifetz

When words leave off, music begins.

Heinrich Heine

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo

[Music is] the favorite passion of my soul.

Thomas Jefferson

Without music life would be a mistake.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

Plato, The Republic

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

Igor Stravinsky

In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.

George Szell

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence of it in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.

Henry David Thoreau

Most rock journalism is people who can not write interviewing people who can not talk.

Frank Zappa

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