AC > AC's Quotes

“Where the bright seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.”
― John Milton, The Complete Poetry

“What we play is life.”
― Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings

“Don't play what's there; play what's not there.”
― Miles Davis

“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
― Miles Davis

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”
― Gustav Mahler

“What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.”
― Gustav Mahler

“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wished to make them better.”
― George Frideric Handel, Messiah: Vocal Score

“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“To play without passion is inexcusable!”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“From the glow of enthusiasm I let the melody escape. I pursue it. Breathless I catch up with it. It flies again; it disappears; it plunges into a chaos of diverse emotions. I catch it again; I seize it; I embrace it with delight.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life.”
― Franz Liszt

“Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.”
― Franz Liszt

“People think I'm disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.”
― Luciano Pavarotti

“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”
― Sergei Rachmaninoff

“music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light”
― Claude Debussy

“How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.”
― Claude Debussy

“I’ve learned what ‘classical’ means. It means something that sings and dances through sheer joy of existence.”
― Gustav Holst

“A fresh approach to a work of music (...) usually comes to those who have a fresh approach to aspects of life, to life in general.”
― Dmitri Shostakovich

“I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear.”
― Freddie Mercury

“When children listen to music, they don't just listen. They melt into the melody and flow with the rhythm. Something inside starts to unfold its wings - soon the child and the music are one.”
― Michael Jackson