Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Today we celebrate the day of the musician. Here is a selection of words to commemorate them:
Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aaron Copland
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Carl Maria von Weber
What love is to man, music is to the arts and to mankind.
Claudio Monteverdi
The end of all good music is to affect the soul.
Dimitri Shostakovich
A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
Frederic Chopin
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Life without music would be a mistake.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Giuseppe Verdi
I adore art… when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
Gustav Mahler
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Hector Berlioz
Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.
Igor Stravinsky
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Jean Sibelius
Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic.
Johannes Brahms
It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
Johann Sebastian Bach
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Lao Tzu
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Leo Tolstoy
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
Maurice Ravel
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
Plato
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.
Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
In the next world I shan’t be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
Robert Schumann
Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.
Victor Hugo
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
William Shakespeare
If music be the food of love, play on.
(via thecultofgenius)
