Music Quotes, Sayings

These inspiring and uplifting music quotes will hit all the right notes for those who are passionate about music.

Uplifting music quotes to inspire you

Music lovers know that music is the soundtrack of the soul. It often speaks to us like no other form of art, communicating in ways words alone often fail.

Let these quotes help you express your thoughts and feelings with the grace and eloquence of music.

1. Best music quotes

Here is a collection of the best music quotes by famous musicians, artists, writers, and more.

Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
Victor Hugo

If music be the food of love, play on.
William Shakespeare

Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.
Maria von Trapp

The only truth is music.
Jack Kerouac

music quotes

2. Music can change the world

Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
Maya Angelou

Music changes, and I’m gonna change right along with it.
Aretha Franklin

If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
Vera Nazarin

Music unites

Music is the universal language of mankind.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where words leave off, music begins.
Heinrich Heine

Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.
Sarah Dessen

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.
Keith Richards

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

3. Music is food for the soul

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.
Plato

I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky

Music is an outburst of the soul.
Frederick Delius

A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good.
Colbie Caillat

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach

Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.
Aretha Franklin

Music is to the soul what words are to the mind.
Modest Mouse

Music and healing

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.
Elton John

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Henry David Thoreau

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
Martin Luther

Victor Hugo music quote

4. Music quotes about love

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.
Maurice Ravel

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

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley

5. Music quotes about life

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
Albert Einstein

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Without music, life would be a blank to me.
Jane Austen

Tell me what you listen to, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Tiffanie DeBartolo

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

Some people have lives; some people have music.
John Green

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.
Nicholas Sparks

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
George Eliot

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
Charles Darwin

Music quotes to live by

Wake up, live your life and sing the melody of your soul.
Amit Ray

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?
Michael Jackson

Music is the tool to express life — and all that makes a difference.
Herbie Hancock

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

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran

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

Quote about music by Mozart

6. Music quotes for kids and students

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
Miles Davis

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W.H. Auden

Music is the only thing I’ve ever known that doesn’t have any rules at all.
Josh Homme

You have to, take a deep breath. and allow the music to flow through you. Revel in it, allow yourself to awe. When you play allow the music to break your heart with its beauty.
Kelly White

Music education

The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.
Pete Seeger

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Claude Debussy

7. Music and happiness sayings

Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.
Emory Austin

Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
Haruki Murakami

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Music and emotions

How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?
Jane Swan

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.
Pablo Casals

If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna Akhmatova

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.
Johnny Depp

8. Inspirational music sayings

Music can change the world because it can change people.
Bono

Music is everybody’s business. It’s only the publishers who think people own it.
John Lennon

Music should be an essential part of every analysis.
Carl Jung

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

Uplifting music quotes

We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Music is a higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
John Keats

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
Bruce Springsteen

For me, there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
Eric Clapton

Deep sayings

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

Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.
Robert Browning

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein

Zen music quotes

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Lao Tzu

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

Jack Kerouac quote

9. Short music quotes

Use these short sayings as tattoo ideas or for adding a caption to your music-themed Instagram photos or Whatsapp status.

My ambition was to live like music.
Mary Gaitskill

As long as we live, there is never enough singing.
Martin Luther

Where words fail, music speaks.
Hans Christian Andersen

Music is my higher power.
Oliver James

Music is the strongest form of magic.
Marilyn Manson

Music, my rampart and my only one.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Music comes to me more readily than words.
Ludwig Van Beethoven

10. Funny music quotes

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Hans Christian Andersen

Music makes one feel so romantic — at least it always gets on one’s nerves — which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
Frank Zappa

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest.
Erik Satie

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
Tom Waits

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.
Chet Atkins

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
Kurt Vonnegut

11. Famous music quotes and sayings

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here!”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.
Kurt Vonnegut

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou

By musicians, artists, and composers

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.
Franz Liszt

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

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
Bob Marley

I merely took the energy it takes to pour and wrote some blues.
Duke Ellington

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy

People haven’t always been there for me but music always has.
Taylor Swift

Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.
Ray Charles

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
Louis Armstrong

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


We hope you enjoyed reading these inspiring music quotes and sayings. Here are more music-inspired lists you might be interested in too:

Song quotes and singing sayings

Songs With Girl Names in the Title

Songs With Boy Names in the Title


By Greg Johnson | Published 6/22/2022