Inspiring Musician Quotes to Ignite Your Creativity

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."

- Ludwig van Beethoven

"Music does bring people together. It allows us to experience the same emotions. People everywhere are the same in heart and spirit. No matter what language we speak, what color we are, the form of our politics or the expression of our love and our faith, music proves: We are the same."

- John Denver

"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

"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

"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between."

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."

- Plato

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal."

- Igor Stravinsky

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything."

- Plato

"Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart."

- Pablo Casals

"Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens."

- Maria von Trapp

"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one."

- Dmitri Shostakovich

"Music is healing. Music holds things together."

- Prince

"If you play music with passion and love and honesty, then it will nourish your soul, heal your wounds and make your life worth living. Music is its own reward."

- Sting

"Music can change the world because it can change people."

- Bono

"Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words."

- Robert G. Ingersoll

"Where words fail, music speaks."

- Hans Christian Andersen

"Music is the universal language of mankind."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers."

- Roy Ayers

"If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow."

- Beyoncé

"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

"Without music, life would be a mistake."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"If I cannot fly, let me sing."

- Stephen Sondheim

"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

"Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die."

- Paul Simon

"Music is not take it or leave it; Music is life or death!"

- Joss Stirling

"Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours."

- Elton John

"Music… is the only real religion that is worth devoting your soul to. It is the last remnant of the primal scream, the funeral dirge, and the wedding march. It is the light that keeps me out of the shadows, and it is the reason my immortal soul is not in dire straits."

- Corey Taylor

"Music doesn't get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn't necessarily know you had inside you and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts."

- Matt Haig

"We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy

"People haven’t always been there for me, but music always has."

- Taylor Swift

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."

- Aldous Huxley

"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

"My music isn’t just music—it’s medicine."

- Kanye West

"Music is a weapon in the war against unhappiness."

- Jason Mraz

"Music in the soul can be heard by the universe."

- Lao Tzu

"Music is my religion."

- Jimi Hendrix

"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

"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

"Music is the emotional life of most people."

- Leonard Cohen

"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

"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

"Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond."

- Ray Charles

"Music is the tool to express life—and all that makes a difference."

- Herbie Hancock

"My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary."

- Martin Luther

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."

- Robert Schumann

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."

- Bob Marley

"It's a great thing about being a musician; you don't stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it's a wonderful thing to do."

- Marcus Miller

"Just as Jesus created wine from water, we humans are capable of transmuting emotion into music."

- Carlos Santana

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts."

- Billy Joel

"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art."

- Claude Debussy

"I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet."

- Ludwig van Beethoven

"Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you’re doing. If you’re not going to be confident, you might as well not be doing it."

- Aretha Franklin

"Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them."

- Louis Armstrong

"Despite everything, no one can dictate who you are to other people."

- Prince

"I decided long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow; if I fail, or if I succeed at least I did as I believe."

- Whitney Houston

"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife."

- Kahlil Gibran

"Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies."

- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

"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

"Music can change the world."

- Ludwig van Beethoven

"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

"Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common."

- Sarah Dessen

"I've found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow."

- Bryce W. Anderson

"Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch."

- Debasish Mridha

"Without music, life would be a blank to me."

- Jane Austen

"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

"Music… can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."

- Leonard Bernstein

"Music is what tells us that the human race is greater than we realize."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

- Berthold Auerbach

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."

- Victor Hugo

"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

"I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others."

- James Taylor

"The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you."

- BB King

"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."

- Robert Fripp

"Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without."

- Confucius

"A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good."

- Colbie Caillat

"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

"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue."

- Plato

"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

"Imagination creates reality."

- Richard Wagner

"I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."

- J.S. Bach

"A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?"

- Dave Grohl

"The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable."

- H. Auden

"The world’s most famous and popular language is music."

- PSY

"Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends."

- Alphonse de Lamartine

"Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul."

- Johann Sebastian Bach

"You can’t knock on opportunity’s door and not be ready."

- Bruno Mars

"Music is by far the most wonderful method we have to remind us each day of the power of personal accomplishment."

- Chris S. Salazar

"Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast, to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak."

- William Congreve

"One thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the owner of my talent; I’m the manager of it."

- Madonna

"The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with."

- Bruce Springsteen

"Where words leave off, music begins."

- Heinrich Heine

"A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."

- Leopold Stokowski

"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."

- George Eliot

"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

"Music is the shorthand of emotion."

- Leo Tolstoy

"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."

- John Cage

"Life is what happens when you’re making other plans."

- John Lennon

"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

"To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable."

- Aaron Copland

"I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it."

- Igor Stravinsky

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."

- John Keats

"If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music."

- Gustav Mahler

"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

"You can cage the singer but not the song."

- Harry Belafonte

"Music should be your escape."

- Missy Elliott

"Most people die with their music still locked up inside them."

- Benjamin Disraeli

"Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought."

- Yip Harburg

"Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together."

- Edgar Winter

"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."

- Orson Scott Card

"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music."

- Sergei Rachmaninov

"When you're happy, you enjoy the music but when you're sad, you understand the lyrics."

- Frank Ocean

"That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons."

- Dave Grohl

"Music is a great natural high and a great natural escape."

- Shania Twain

"If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing."

- J.M. Barrie

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."

- Frank Zappa

"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

"Life and love go on, let the music play."

- Johnny Cash

"Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking."

- Nina Simone

"Music is the soundtrack of your life."

- Dick Clark

"What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

- Bob Dylan

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."

- Thomas Carlyle

"Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music."

- Marcel Marceau

"Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't."

- Johnny Depp

"Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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

"He who sings frightens away his ills."

- Miguel de Cervantes

"Music is feeling. You can try to verbalize it. It really just hits you or it doesn’t."

- Gene Simmons

"Music is the strongest form of magic."

- Marilyn Manson

"Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory."

- Oscar Wilde

"Music is an outburst of the soul."

- Frederick Delius

"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

"Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music."

- Ronald Reagan

"If Music is a Place – then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple."

- Vera Nazarian

"Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody."

- Joshua Logan

"Country music is three chords and the truth."

- Harlan Howard

"Lose your dreams and you might lose your mind."

- Mick Jagger

"Music is the only thing I’ve ever known that doesn’t have any rules at all."

- Josh Homme

"Music is love in search of a word."

- Sidney Lanier

"At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds."

- John McLaughlin

"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

"The only truth is music."

- Jack Kerouac

"There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original."

- Franz Joseph Haydn

"The wise musicians are those who play what they can master."

- Duke Ellington

"Music gives color to the air of the moment."

- Karl Lagerfeld

"Some people have lives; some people have music."

- John Green

"We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters."

- Eddie van Halen

"Some days there won’t be a song in your heart. Sing anyway."

- Emory Austin

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."

- John Lennon

"Because my musical training has been limited, I've never been restricted by what technical musicians might call a song."

- Neil Diamond

"The truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."

- Elvis Presley

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things."

- Tom Waits

"Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing."

- John Erskine

"The goal is to try and make the perfect song. Which of course will never happen."

- Chris Martin

"The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be."

- Pete Seeger

"Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist."

- Franz Liszt

"Even if you can’t sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your home. But sing."

- Rebbe Nachman

"My ambition was to live like music."

- Mary Gaitskill

"If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, then the end won’t be long."

- Pete Doherty

"All musicians are potential band leaders."

- Thelonious Monk

"I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments."

- John Barrowman

"Music replays the past memories, awaken our forgotten worlds and make our minds travel."

- Michael Bassey Johnson

"There are two means of refuge from the misery of life—music and cats."

- Albert Schweitzer

"Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you."

- Andrew Lloyd Webber

"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."

- Chinese Proverb

"Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have."

- Alex Gaskarth

"The more you love music, the more music you love."

- Tom Moon

"If everyone started off the day singing, just think how happy they'd be."

- Lauren Myracle

"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."

- Pat Conroy

"I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation."

- Criss Jami

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

- Igor Stravinsky

"I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned."

- Elvis Presley

"Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it."

- Karlheinz Stockhausen

"Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune."

- Thomas Fuller

"Why not just live in the moment, especially if it has a good beat?"

- Goldie Hawn

"Or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts."

- T.S. Eliot

"Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung."

- David Levithan

"Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words."

- Elie Wiesel

"If music be the food of love, play on."

- William Shakespeare

"If you talk bad about country music, it's like saying bad things about my momma. Them's fightin' words."

- Dolly Parton

"Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh."

- Mark Twain

"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

"Music should be an essential part of every analysis."

- Carl Jung

"If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together."

- Richard Nixon

"Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie."

- John Milton

"Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure."

"Those who wish to sing always find a song."