Music can be one of the most beautiful, joyful things in life. It can also be incredibly powerful, providing an outlet for emotions and helping us to connect with others.

Whether you’re a musician yourself or just appreciate music, these 57 quotes about music will make you think…and maybe even appreciate it a little bit more.

Quotes About Music

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

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

3. Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. – Plato

4. Without music, life would be a mistake. – Friedrich Nietzsche

5. I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water. – Ray Charles

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

7. Music doesn’t lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music. – Jimi Hendrix

8. 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. – Billy Joel

9. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. – Victor Hugo

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

11. Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it. – John Lennon

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

13. For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness. – Reba McEntire

14. Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us. – Martin Luther

15. Music is my religion. – Jimi Hendrix

16. Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. – Ludwig van Beethoven

17. Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue. – Plato

18. 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

19. In music the passions enjoy themselves. – Friedrich Nietzsche

20. I don’t make music for eyes. I make music for ears. – Adele

21. Hell is full of musical amateurs. – George Bernard Shaw

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

23. Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. – Martin Luther

24. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Berthold Auerbach

25. Music is the shorthand of emotion. – Leo Tolstoy

26. If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together. – Richard M. Nixon

27. There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another. – Frank Zappa

28. You are the music while the music lasts. – T. S. Eliot

29. All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it. – Jean Cocteau

30. Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something. – Frank Zappa

31. Music is the strongest form of magic. – Marilyn Manson

32. If you look deep enough you will see music the heart of nature being everywhere music. – Thomas Carlyle

33. Music is well said to be the speech of angels. – Thomas Carlyle

34. I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed. – B. B. King

35. I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. – Elvis Presley

36. Music is forever music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. – Paul Simon

37. All music is beautiful. – Billy Strayhorn

38. If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. – Gustav Mahler

39. Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune. – Kin Hubbard

40. Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder. – John Ruskin

41. Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. – Thomas Fuller

42. Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. – Jean Paul

43. Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. – William Congreve

44. It was my 16th birthday – my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do – write songs and sing them to people. – Stevie Nicks

45. But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing. – Bryan Ferry

46. Where words fail, music speaks. – Hans Christian Andersen

47. Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music. – Christian Nestell Bovee

48. Music happens to be an art form that transcends language. – Herbie Hancock

49. The wise musicians are those who play what they can master. – Duke Ellington

50. When words leave off, music begins. – Heinrich Heine

51. There’s nothing like music to relieve the soul and uplift it. – Mickey Hart

52. No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. – W. H. Auden

53. He has Van Gogh’s ear for music. – Billy Wilder

54. The iPod completely changed the way people approach music. – Karl Lagerfeld

55. Music is the best means we have of digesting time. – W. H. Auden

56. You can’t stay the same. If you’re a musician and a singer, you have to change, that’s the way it works. – Van Morrison

57. Music is love in search of a word. – Sidney Lanier

We hope you enjoyed this collection of quotes. Check out our picture quote of the day here.