Music Quotes for your Inspiration

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Welcome to GTiD's music quotes! These quotes are taken from our BLOG, where one is published -almost- daily, for your inspiration (as of 04.05.09). So you can expect this section to grow pretty quickly!

You can explore this section in two ways: The fisrt is to see the quotes in the order in which they were published via our RSS feed and Blog. Don't forget to subscribe!

Disclaimer: These quotes are not intended to represent my own points of view. I've chosen them because each is profoundly revealing in two ways:

So, I hope you enjoy this kaleidoscope of ideas as much as I have enjoyed putting it together it for you!!!

music quote of the day. 10.02.09

"The more you know, the less you know. I don't feel like I know shit anymore, but I love it!"
-Mike Stern (Jazz Guitarist)

music quote of the day. 10.03.09

"Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule."
-Samuel Butler

music quote of the day. 10.04.09

"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."
-Igor Stravinsky

music quote of the day. 10.05.09

"I always liked the studio best, once I got the hang of it and the control. I like it because it's complete control"
-John Lennon

music quote of the day. 10.06.09

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things."
-Tom Waits

music quote of the day. 10.07.09

"There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone."
-Duke Ellington

music quote of the day. 10.08.09

"We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so."
-B. B. King

music quote of the day. 10.09.09

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

music quote of the day. 10.10.09

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music."
-Ezra Pound

music quote of the day. 10.11.09

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it."
-Duke Ellington

quote of the day. 10.12.09

"We accept the desirability of studying internal formal and structural relationships in a human product which is obviously systematic -yet we have no tools for approaching the intuitive human activity that controls decision making in spontaneous composition."
-Norma Mcleod, "Some Techniques for Analysis of Non-Western Music"

quote of the day. 10.13.09

"I think playing and writing go hand in hand. I don't feel that at this stage of the game I can actually sit down and say I'm going to write a piece that will do this or that for the people -a thing which some artists can do- but I'm trying to tune myself so I can look to myself and to nature and to other sounds in music and interpret things that I feel there and present them to people. Eventually I hope to reach a stage where I have a vast warehouse of study and knowledge to be able to produce any certain thing.

Duke Ellington is one person who can do this -that's really heavy musicianship and I haven't reached that stage yet. I've been predominantly a soloist all my natural life, and now I'm a soloist with my own band, and this has led me into this other thing: what am I going to play and why?

My material is mainly my own, and I find some of my best work comes from the most challenging material. Sometimes we write things to be easy, sometimes to be hard, it depends on what we want to do. A year ago we had quite a few standards which made up a third of the book, but now other people, certainly Ornette (Coleman) and Eric (Dolphy), have been responsible for other influences."
-John Coltrane, 1962 interview, Jazz Monthly

quote of the day. 10.14.09

"I don't give a fuck if you boo, as long as you boo in key..."
-Jimi Hendrix

quote of the day. 10.15.09

"The most necessary, most difficult and principal thing in music, that is time."
-W.A. Mozart

quote of the day. 10.16.09

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
-Albert Einstein

quote of the day. 10.17.09

"Guitar playing, as currently understood, has more to do with sports than it does to do with music. It's an Olympic challenge type of situation. The challenges are in the realm of speed, redundancy, choreography, and grooming... ...clouds of educated gnat-notes."
-Frank Zappa

quote of the day. 10.18.09

"Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quote of the day. 10.19.09

"Is it humiliating for me to appear in public? Yes; for anyone in their right mind it's humiliating.
We're all turkeys, you know... you only have to put a person on stage; nothing can be hidden from the audience. And if you are a turkey, and we all are turkeys, it's obvious to everyone that we are the turkey that we are, and that's humiliating.
If one works under the deluded notion that the musician creates music, then the humiliation of playing in front of people cuts the egotism down to a point where one can come into a better relationship with music, and realizing that we really are feeble creatures; then one can give music the respect which it deserves.
Humiliation is inevitable, painful, and if on has the strength to bear it, very useful."
-Robert Fripp

quote of the day. 10.20.09

"Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself..."
-Miles Davis

quote of the day. 10.21.09

"Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world."
-Giuseppe Mazzini (Italian Revolutionary, 1800's)

quote of the day. 10.22.09

"Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?"
-Ludwig van Beethoven

music quote of the day. 10.23.09

"One day I said to myself that it would be better to get rid of all that -melody, rhythm, harmony, etc. This was not a negative thought and did not mean that it was necessary to avoid them, but rather that, while doing something else, they would appear spontaneously. We had to liberate ourselves from the direct and peremptory consequence of intention and effect, because the intention would always be our own and would be circumscribed, when so many other forces are evidently in action in the final effect."
-Christian Wolff

quote of the day. 10.24.09

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."
-Voltaire (1694-1778)

quote of the day. 10.25.09

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."
-John Cage

quote of the day. 10.26.09

"Hell is full of musical amateurs."
-George Bernard Shaw

quote of the day. 10.27.09

"Music is the shorthand of emotion."
-Leo Tolstoy

quote of the day. 10.28.09

"...if you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing. So it didn't matter what other bands were doing... we did what we were doing."
-Jimmy Page

quote of the day. 10.29.09

"The history of a people is found in its songs."
-George Jellinek

quote of the day. 10.30.09

"All that business was awful, it was a fuckin' humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent. I didn't know, I didn't foresee. It happened bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand -the people you hated when you were ten."
-John Lennon

quote of the day. 10.31.09

"Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice."
-Robert Fripp

music quote of the day. 11.01.09

"If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die."
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

quote of the day. 11.02.09

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."
-John Cage

music quote of the day. 11.03.09

"There are no wrong notes."
-Miles Davis

music quote of the day. 11.04.09

"Music in the soul can be heard by the universe."
-Lao Tzu

music quote of the day. 11.05.09

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds."
-Dizzy Gillespie

music quote of the day. 11.06.09

"I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music."
-George Harrison

Rock Quotes from all the rock greats: Jimi Hendrix quotes, John Lennon quotes, Jim Morrison quotes, Frank Zappa quotes, Bob Dylan quotes, Janis Joplin quotes, Elvis quotes, George Harrison quotes, Mick Jagger quotes, Eric Clapton quotes, Robert Fripp quotes, Trent Reznor quotes, Bradley Nowell quotes, Steve Howe quotes, Robbie Robertson quotes, Jimmy Page quotes, Tom Waits quotes, James Brown quotes, Tori Amos quotes, Bryan Ferry quotes, John Denver quotes, and more to come!

Jazz Quotes from all the Jazz greats: Miles Davis quotes, Joe Pass quotes, Charlie Parker quotes, Duke Ellington quotes, Bill Evans quotes, John Coltrane quotes, Dizzy Gillespie quotes, Mike Stern quotes, John Scofield quotes, Oscar Hammerstein quotes, and more to come!