125 The Inspirational and Magical Power Music Quotes

Music Quotes – What would your life be like if there was no music? It’s almost impossible to accomplish.

We are continuously surrounded by music, whether we are driving to the beach on a hot summer day or listening to muzak in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

The music we listen to is a part of practically every element of our lives, whether it’s for weddings, breakups, parties, hanging out with friends, singing along with our children, or caroling a Christmas carol.

Much like a great movie soundtrack enhances the viewing experience, most of us have songs that highlight certain stages of our life, tunes that quickly transport us back to specific events or memories when we hear them, even years after they were initially heard.

For the occasion of acknowledging the enchanted sentiments that music may elicit in us, we’ve compiled a collection of 120+ quotes about music.

Some of these music quotes are from the musical artists themselves, while others are from philosophers, authors, and other artists who have contributed to the field.

But, regardless of who it was that said these uplifting words, these music quotations are all excellent examples of how music has a profound impact on our lives.

The inspirational and magical power music quotes

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

2. “Where words fail, music speaks.” — Hans Christian Andersen

3. “Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.” ― Edward Bulwer Lytton

4. “Where words leave off, music begins.” — Heinrich Heine

5. “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” ― Confucius

6. “Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t.” ― Johnny Depp

7. “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” ― Tom Waits

8. “Music is the universal language of mankind.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

9. “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” ― Douglas Adams

10. “Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

11. “Music is healing. Music holds things together.” ― Prince

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

13. “Music can change the world.” — Ludwig van Beethoven

14. “There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.” — Sun Tzu

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

16. “The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.” — Roy Ayers

17. “Music is the strongest form of magic.” ― Marilyn Manson

18. “He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.” ― Hannah Harrington, Saving June

19. “Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.” ― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

20. “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” ― George Eliot

21. “If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, then the end won’t be long.” — Pete Doherty

22. “The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.” — Duke Ellington

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

24. “I’ve found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.” ― Bryce W. Anderson

25. “Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.” — Oscar Wilde

26. “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

27. “Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.” — Robert Fripp

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

29. “Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.” — Billy Joel

30. “Love is friendship set to music.” — Jackson Pollock

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

32. “Music is an outburst of the soul.” ― Frederick Delius

33. “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

34. “Those who wish to sing always find a song.” — Unknown

35. “Can a mere song change a people’s minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.” ― Elvis Costello

36. “Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.” ― Pablo Casals

37. “How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations?” — Jane Swan

38. “Music is life itself.” — Louis Armstrong

39. “Once again, she was free. Once again, she found peace. It was music that freed her soul from the dungeon of her mind.” ― Wiss Auguste, The Illusions of Hope

40. “Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” ― Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

41. “Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.” ― John Erskine

42. “I’ve always said music should make you laugh, make you cry or make you think.” — Kenny Rogers

43. “Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch.” ― Debasish Mridha

44. “Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music.” — Ronald Reagan

45. “Music replays the past memories, awaken our forgotten worlds and make our minds travel.” ― Michael Bassey Johnson

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

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

48. “Without music, life would be a blank to me.” — Jane Austen, Emma

49. “I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments.” — John Barrowman

50. “Country music is three chords and the truth.” — Harlan Howard

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

52. “Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.” — Thomas Fuller

53. “Music is the soundtrack of your life.” — Dick Clark

54. “Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me.” — Eddie Van Halen

55. “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

56. “The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.” — H. Auden

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

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

59. “Music is love in search of a word.” — Sidney Lanier

60. “The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” — Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape

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

62. “Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.” — Henry Ward Beecher

63. “The only truth is music.” — Jack Kerouac

64. “Music… can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.” — Leonard Bernstein

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

66. “Music is the shorthand of emotion.” — Leo Tolstoy

67. “Some people have lives; some people have music.” — John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

68. “Music gives color to the air of the moment.” — Karl Lagerfeld

69. “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” — Marcel Marceau

70. “Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing.” — Rebbe Nachman

71. “Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

72. “A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” — Leopold Stokowski

73. “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Berthold Auerbach

74. “He who sings frightens away his ills.” — Miguel de Cervantes

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

76. “When we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.” — Alan Watts

77. “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” — Victor Hugo

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

79. “Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.” — Joshua Logan

80. “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, According to the Rolling Stones

81. “Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn’t.” — Gene Simmons

82. “The world’s most famous and popular language is music.” — PSY

83. “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

84. “My ambition was to live like music.” — Mary Gaitskill

85. “Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

87. “Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.” — Nina Simone

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

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

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

91. “Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvelous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.” — Frédéric Chopin

92. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” —Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

93. “If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.” — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

94. “Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.” — Paul Simon

95. “Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness.” — Jason Mraz

96. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” — John Keats

97. “If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.” — Gustav Mahler

98. “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

99. “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, The Last Song

100. “Music is the emotional life of most people.” — Leonard Cohen

101. “You can cage the singer but not the song.” — Harry Belafonte

102. “Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape.” — Shania Twain

103. “Music is my religion.” — Jimi Hendrix

104. “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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

106. “Life and love go on, let the music play.” — Johnny Cash

107. “Music should be your escape.” — Missy Elliot

108. “People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has.” — Taylor Swift

109. “My music isn’t just music—it’s medicine.” — Kanye West

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

111. “Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.” — Lao Tzu

112. “People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.” — Michael Jackson

113. “If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.’” — Kurt Vonnegut

114. “Without music, life would be a mistake.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

115. “If music be the food of love, play on.” — William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

116. “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

117. “I believe that a person’s taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know.” — Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

118. “Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you.” — Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera

119. “If I cannot fly, let me sing.” ― Stephen Sondheim

120. “Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

121. “Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?” ― Goldie Hawn

122. “I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.” — Criss Jami, Killisophy

123. “The more you love music, the more music you love.” – Tom Moon

124. “Live your truth. Express your love. Share your enthusiasm. Take action towards your dreams. Walk your talk. Dance and sing to your music. Embrace your blessings. Make today worth remembering.” — Steve Maraboli

125. “Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.” — Yip Harburg

Those music quotes and hope you found these quotations interesting. Regardless, you’ve gained some excellent defensive tools to use against individuals who choose to disagree with your choice of profession or educational path.

You may simply inform them that Einstein, Confucius, and Plato are on your side. It is effective every time.