β
Without music, life would be a mistake.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols)
β
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent
β
β
Victor Hugo
β
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
People haven't always been there for me but music always has.
β
β
Taylor Swift
β
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
β
β
Maya Angelou
β
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.
β
β
Langston Hughes (The Collected Poems)
β
Some people have lives; some people have music.
β
β
John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
β
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.
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
β
β
Annie Proulx
β
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
β
β
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
β
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
β
β
Aldous Huxley (Music at Night and Other Essays)
β
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
β
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
β
β
Victor Hugo (William Shakespeare)
β
If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks
β
Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
β
Music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in your or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment.
β
β
Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)
β
There are two means of refuge from the misery of life β music and cats.
β
β
Albert Schweitzer
β
And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make.
β
β
Paul McCartney (The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics)
β
We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
β
β
Arthur O'Shaughnessy (Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy)
β
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.
β
β
Charles Darwin (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809β82)
β
Where words leave off, music begins.
β
β
Heinrich Heine
β
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
β
β
Frank Zappa
β
None but ourselves can free our minds.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
The only truth is music.
β
β
Jack Kerouac
β
The earth has its music for those who will listen
β
β
Reginald Vincent Holmes (Fireside Fancies)
β
Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy
β
β
Ludwig van Beethoven
β
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more
β
β
Lord Byron
β
Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!
β
β
Bram Stoker
β
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.
β
β
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship)
β
If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
β
β
Anna Akhmatova (The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova)
β
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
β
β
Roberto BolaΓ±o (2666)
β
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
β
β
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
β
The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.
β
β
Gloria Naylor (Linden Hills)
β
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
β
β
Hermann Hesse
β
Rue, who when you ask her what she loves most in the world, replies, of all things, βMusic.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
β
Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.
β
β
Henry Van Dyke (Music and Other Poems)
β
Music is to the soul what words are to the mind.
β
β
Modest Mouse (Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News)
β
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin
β
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)
β
Life, he realize, 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.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (The Last Song)
β
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
β
β
Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)
β
Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
β
β
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
β
Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.
β
β
Johnny Depp
β
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.
β
β
Henry David Thoreau
β
I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!
β
β
Dr. Seuss (Horton Hatches the Egg)
β
Where words fail, music speaks.
β
β
Hans Christian Andersen
β
Mockingbirds donβt do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They donβt eat up peopleβs gardens, donβt nest in corncribs, they donβt do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. Thatβs why itβs a sin to kill a mockingbird.
β
β
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
β
Next to music, beer was best.
β
β
Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)
β
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
β
β
Nick Hornby
β
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin
β
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
β
β
Ansel Adams
β
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
β
β
Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)
β
Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
β
β
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
β
Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you've had a bunch of bad days and there's different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned completely to music.
β
β
Taylor Swift
β
My ambition was to live like music.
β
β
Mary Gaitskill
β
Somebody just gave me a shower radio. Thanks a lot. Do you really want music in the shower? I guess there's no better place to dance than a slick surface next to a glass door.
β
β
Jerry Seinfeld
β
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
β
β
Henry Miller
β
Music is the universal language of mankind.
β
β
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
β
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
β
β
John Keats
β
Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)
β
Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
β
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
β
β
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
β
He accused me of being Dumbledore's man through and through."
"How very rude of him."
"I told him I was."
Dumbledore opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Fawkes the phoenix let out a low, soft, musical cry. To Harry's intense embarrassment, he suddenly realized that Dumbledore's bright blue eyes looked rather watery, and stared hastily at his own knee. When Dumbledore spoke, however, his voice was quite steady.
"I am very touched, Harry.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
β
To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.
β
β
Osho
β
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
β
β
Maya Angelou
β
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor β such is my idea of happiness.
β
β
Leo Tolstoy (Π‘Π΅ΠΌΠ΅ΠΉΠ½ΠΎΠ΅ ΡΡΠ°ΡΡΠΈΠ΅)
β
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
β
β
Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
β
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (Fear & Loathing Letters, #1))
β
Play it fuckin' loud!
β
β
Bob Dylan
β
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
β
β
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
β
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
β
β
Martin Luther King Jr.
β
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.
β
β
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1))
β
Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson
β
I don't stand for black man's side, I don't stand for white man's side, I stand for God's side.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.
β
β
Katharine Weber (The Music Lesson)
β
Because when he sings...even the birds stop to listen.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
β
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
β
β
Bob Dylan
β
Noah: "You wanna dance with me?"
Allie: "Sure. Now?"
Noah: "Mmm Hmm"
Allie: "You're not supposed to dance in the street."
Noah: "You are supposed to dance in the street."
Allie: "Yeah, but we don't have any music."
Noah: "Well, we'll make some... Bum bum bum bum bum bum..."
Allie: "You're a terrible singer."
Noah: "I know."
Allie: "And I like this song.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)
β
If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.
β
β
Keith Richards (Keith Richards: In His Own Words)
β
Atticus said to Jem one day, "Iβd rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know youβll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit βem, but remember itβs a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your fatherβs right," she said. "Mockingbirds donβt do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They donβt eat up peopleβs gardens, donβt nest in corn cribs, they donβt do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. Thatβs why itβs a sin to kill a mockingbird.
β
β
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
β
You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again.
β
β
Maggie Stiefvater (Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception (Books of Faerie, #1))
β
Songs are as sad as the listener.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
β
I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
β
β
Bob Dylan
β
Life's as kind as you let it be.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Hot Water Music)
β
And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
Funny, when you finally faced reality, it was amazing how clearly you could see things.
β
β
Mary Higgins Clark (Loves Music, Loves to Dance)
β
The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.
β
β
Lester Bangs
β
If you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you can find out first hand what it's like to be me.
β
β
Gerard Way
β
I had a boyfriend who told me Iβd never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped Iβd fail. I said to him, βSomeday, when weβre not together, you wonβt be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me.
β
β
Lady Gaga
β
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into oneβs life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to oneβs side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
β
β
L.M. Montgomery
β
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
β
β
David Foster Wallace
β
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
β
β
Charles Bukowski
β
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And donβt bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: βItβs not where you take things from - itβs where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]
β
β
Jim Jarmusch
β
You know what would help?" I asked, not meeting his eyes.
"Hmm?"
"If you turned off this crap music and put on something that came out after the Berlin Wall went down."
Dimitri laughted. "Your worst class is history, yet somehow, you know everything about Eastern Europe."
"Hey, gotta have material for my jokes, Comrade." Still smiling, he turned the radio dail. To a country station.
"Hey! This isn't what I had in mind," I exclaimed. I could tell he was on the verge of laughing again.
"Pick. It's one or the other."
I sighed. "Go back to the 1980s stuff."
He flipped the dail, and I crossed my arms over my chest as some vaguely European-sounding band sang about how video had killed the radio star. I wished someone would kill this radio.
β
β
Richelle Mead (Frostbite (Vampire Academy, #2))
β
What am I in the eyes of most people β a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person β somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then β even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
β
β
Vincent van Gogh
β
This is for girls who have the tendency to stay up at night listening to music that reminds them of their current situation. Who hide their fears, hurt, pain and tears under the smiles, laughs and giggles on a daily basis. The girls who wear their heart on their sleeve. The girls who pray that things will work out just once and they'll be satisfied. The girls who sceam and cry to their pillows because everyone else fails to listen. The girls who have so many secrets but wont tell a soul. The girls who have mistakes and regrets as a daily moral. The girls that never win. The girls that stay up all night thinking about that one boy and hoping that he'll notice her one day. The girls who take life as it comes, to the girls who are hoping that it'll get better somewhere down the road. For the girls who love with all their heart although it always gets broken. To girls who think it's over. To real girls, to all girls: You're beautiful.
β
β
Zayn Malik
β
Here's to the kids.
The kids who would rather spend their night with a bottle of coke & Patrick or Sonny playing on their headphones than go to some vomit-stained high school party.
Here's to the kids whose 11:11 wish was wasted on one person who will never be there for them.
Here's to the kids whose idea of a good night is sitting on the hood of a car, watching the stars.
Here's to the kids who never were too good at life, but still were wicked cool.
Here's to the kids who listened to Fall Out boy and Hawthorne Heights before they were on MTV...and blame MTV for ruining their life.
Here's to the kids who care more about the music than the haircuts.
Here's to the kids who have crushes on a stupid lush.
Here's to the kids who hum "A Little Less 16 Candles, A Little More Touch Me" when they're stuck home, dateless, on a Saturday night.
Here's to the kids who have ever had a broken heart from someone who didn't even know they existed.
Here's to the kids who have read The Perks of Being a Wallflower & didn't feel so alone after doing so.
Here's to the kids who spend their days in photobooths with their best friend(s).
Here's to the kids who are straight up smartasses & just don't care.
Here's to the kids who speak their mind.
Here's to the kids who consider screamo their lullaby for going to sleep.
Here's to the kids who second guess themselves on everything they do.
Here's to the kids who will never have 100 percent confidence in anything they do, and to the kids who are okay with that.
Here's to the kids.
This one's not for the kids,
who always get what they want,
But for the ones who never had it at all.
It's not for the ones who never got caught,
But for the ones who always try and fall.
This one's for the kids who didnt make it,
We were the kids who never made it.
The Overcast girls and the Underdog Boys.
Not for the kids who had all their joys.
This one's for the kids who never faked it.
We're the kids who didn't make it.
They say "Breaking hearts is what we do best,"
And, "We'll make your heart be ripped of your chest"
The only heart that I broke was mine,
When I got My Hopes up too too high.
We were the kids who didnt make it.
We are the kids who never made it.
β
β
Pete Wentz
β
My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.
I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.
β
β
Tom Waits