S quotes

View Quote I might as well endeavour to perswade, that the Sun is a glorious, and beneficial Planet; as take pains to Illustrate Musick with my imperfect praises; for every reasonable Mans own mind will be its Advocate. Musick, belov'd of Heaven, for it is the business of Angels; Desired on Earth as the most charming Pleasure of Men. The world contains nothing that is good, but what is full of Harmonious Concord, nor nothing that is evil, but is its opposite, as being the ill favour'd production of Discord and Disorder. I dare affirm, those that love not Musick (if there be any such) are Dissenters from Ingenuity, and Rebels to the Monarchy of Reason.

View Quote Humphrey Salter (1683). The Genteel Companion. 

View Quote Music is essentially useless, as life is.

View Quote George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4

View Quote The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

View Quote Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819) Vol. I, Ch. II.

View Quote This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be.

View Quote Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Representation: Second Aspect, Vol. I, Ch. III as translated by Eric F. J. Payne (1958).

View Quote The term 'chromatic' is understood by musicians to refer to music which includes tones which are not members of the prevailing scale, and also as a word descriptive of those individually non-diatonic tones.

View Quote J. Shir-Cliff (1965). Chromatic Harmony. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0029286301. 

View Quote If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.

View Quote William Shakespeare, Orsino in Twelfth Night Act I, sc. i.

View Quote Music is the brandy of the damned.

View Quote George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman (Act III) (1903).

View Quote We give our souls to our music. We put our lives on the ****ing wax and the labels treat us like shit.

View Quote Earl Simmons, on the Backstreet Boys and label problems, as quoted in XXL Magazine.

View Quote Sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane.

View Quote Germaine de Staël, De l'Allemagne (1813) Information gathered from the Quote Investigator.

View Quote [S]o far as music ever had a "meaning" beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its "meaning" must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or "the nature of existence"; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole.

View Quote Olaf Stapledon, Sirius (1944).

View Quote It was music, more than anything else, that led the Pythagoreans to believe that the universe is a harmonious place governed by numbers.

View Quote Ian Stewart, Another Fine Math You’ve Got Me Into (1992) p. 236

View Quote I was ... attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all my answer was and is the same: You “respect,” but I love.

View Quote Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments (1959), pp. 113-114