100 Awesome Quotes About Music For Your White Board
In my big general quotes post, 100 Awesome Quotes for Your White Board, I wrote about how we use quotes in our classroom to prompt copywork, writing assignments, and critical thinking.
Next I wrote 100 Awesome Quotes About Sports For Your White Board, and that one was a lot of fun, too! After that, it was 100 Awesome Quotes About Christmas for Your White Board, and that one included a free printable for your students to do a little bit of copywork.
Now it's time to focus on music quotes - inspirational, funny, deep, light, and useful. Think of the possibilities beyond your classroom or homeschool white board: gifts for music teachers and musicians, alike.
As someone who educates my kids at home, we use quotes on the white board during our group teaching time. You can read more about how we do that here: Creating a Circle Time That Works For You
100 Awesome Quotes About Music For Your White Board
1. Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music. -Woflgang Amadeus Mozart
2. Endeavour to play easy pieces well and with elegance; that is better than to play difficult pieces badly. -Robert Schumann
3. Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music. -Woflgang Amadeus Mozart
4. There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise. -Terry Pratchett
5. . . . (regarding the prelude from suite two) . . . The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered. -Eric Siblin
6. Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music. -Martin Luther
7. The piano ain't got no wrong notes. -Thelonious Monk
8. Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. -Alfred Lord Tennyson
9. Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is connected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical. -Conan O'Brien
10. Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference. -Kurt Vonnegut
11. Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions. -Brennan Manning
12. When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. -Bob Hope
13. I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down. -Virgil Thomson
14. We have a lot of questions, and we want to understand. Music helps with that. Music helps with everything. -Lisa Schroeder
15. The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable. -W.H. Auden
16. Music links us humans, heart to heart ... Across time and space, and life and death. -Nancy Werlin
17. I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning. -Plato
18. The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are. -Stephen J. Rivele
19. I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else. -Hoda Kotb
20. Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. -Sergei Rachmaninoff
21. You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is. -Rebecca West
22. Ah, the magic of music, with it, all things are possible. -E.A. Bucchianeri
23. Those who wish to sing always find a song. -Swedish Proverb
24. Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener. -Jimmy Buffett
25. 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. -Thomas Carlyle
26. One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen. -Charles Frazier
27. Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. -Paul Simon
28. The more you love music, the more music you love. -Tom Moon
29. Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least. -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
30. Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in. -Stephen Sondheim
31. It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. -Benjamin Britten
32. Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own. -Leonard Bernstein
33. A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra. -Guy de Maupassant
34. A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. -Frank Zappa
35. There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. -George Eliot
36. Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung. -David Levithan
37. Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing. -John Erskine
38. If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
-Oscar Wilde
39. Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. -Thomas Merton
40. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music. -Lauren Oliver
41. Through music we may wander where we will in time, and find friends in every century. -Helen Thompson
42. Don't be afraid, just play the music. -Charlie Parker
43. Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be? -Michael Jackson
44. Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words. -Elie Wiesel
45. A person who . . . does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs. -Martin Luther
46. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. -Edith Wharton
47. Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man. -Frédéric Chopin
48. I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly. -George Harrison
49. He who sings scares away his woes. -Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
50. It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once. -Nina LaCour
51. Too bad people can't always be playing music, maybe then there wouldn't be any more wars. -Margot Benary-Isbert
52. Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have. -Alex Gaskarth
53. When words fail music speaks. -Irena Huang
54. You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar. -Stephen King
55. I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet. -Ludwig van Beethoven
56. Life is one grand sweet song so start the music. -Ronald Reagan
57. Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize. -Napoléon Bonaparte
58. When you play, never mind who listens to you. -Robert Schumann
59. She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance. -Ayn Rand
60. Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart. -Pablo Casals
61. Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory. -Percy Bysshe Shelley
62. The artist must forget the audience, forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music. Then, the music speaks through the performance, and the performer and the listener will walk together with the soul of the composer, and with God. -Mstislav Rostropovich
63. 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
64. 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. -William Shakespeare
65. I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it. -Igor Stravinsky
66. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie. -John Milton
67. I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I'm lost in the music. Until I am the music--notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it's okay because when I'm the music, I'm not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty. -Jennifer Donnelly
68. How is it that music can, without words, evoke our laughter, our fears, our highest aspirations? -Jane Swan
69. And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
70. Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear. -Ludwig van Beethoven
71. Music can change the world because it can change people. -Bono
72. Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. -Ludwig van Beethoven
73. 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
74. No matter who we are, no matter what our circumstances, our feelings and emotions are universal. And music has always been a great way to make people aware of that connection. It can help you open up a part of yourself and express feelings you didn't know you were feeling. It's risky to let that happen. But it's a risk you have to take-because only then will you find you're not alone. -Josh Groban
75. Every life has a soundtrack. There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up theNew York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory. -Jodi Picoult
76. Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life. -Friedrich Richter
77. Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music. -Chuck Klosterman
78. Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message? -Orson Scott Card
79. 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
80. 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
81. If I cannot fly, let me sing. -Stephen Sondheim
82. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering. -Haruki Murakami
83. All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff. -Frank Zappa
84. Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. -Alphonse de Lamartine
85. If music be the food of love, play on. -William Shakespeare
86. 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
87. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. -Albert Schweitzer
88. The piano keys are black and white but they sound like a million colors in your mind. -Maria Cristina Mena
89. Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. -G.K. Chesterton
90. Music is everybody's business. It's only the publishers who think people own it. -John Lennon
91. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music. -George Eliot
92. Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul. -Johann Sebastian Bach
93. My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary. -Martin Luther
94. Without music, life would be a blank to me. -Jane Austen, Emma
95. If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal. -Mark Helprin
96. 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
97. I like music," she said slowly, "because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play. I'm not . . . for once, I'm not destroying, I'm creating. -Sarah J. Maas
98. Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. -Confucius
99. Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common. -Sarah Dessen
100. Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We use quotes in our homeschool during our group teaching time, or Circle Time. You can learn more about Circle Time by searching the site (on the home page) or purchasing my very helpful eBook, complete with printables for planning.
Click the image to learn more.
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