c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I hope they understand that I'm not angry, I'm just saying... Sometimes goodbye is a second chance.
— Shinedown
Sometimes I just want to paint the words "It's my fault" across my forehead to save people the time of being pissed off at me.
— Christina Westover
She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.
— Paul McCartney
When you play, never mind who listens to you.
— Robert Schumann
You can't kick me down, I'm already on the ground. No, you can't, but you couldn't catch me anyhow.Blue skies, but the sun isn't comming out, no. Today, it is like I'm under a heavy cloud."Avril Lavigne (Runaway)
— Avril Lavigne
We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart- Lady Gaga 10/22/10
— Lady Gaga
Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time."Her words silenced him, steadied him.Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. "Ready?"He smiled. "Play.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss
You fondle my trigger, then you blame my gun
— Fiona Apple
You take the breath right out of meYou left a hole where my heart should be
— Breaking Benjamin
Life is one grand sweet song so start the music
— Ronald Reagan
You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.
— Billie Holiday
I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.
— Nikola Tesla
You,” I said, “are sweet music in a distant room.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
A song she heardOf cold that gathersLike winter's tongueAmong the shadowsIt rose like blacknessIn the skyThat on volcano'sVomit riseA Stone of ruinFrom burn to chillLike black moonriseHer voice fell still...
— Robert Fanney
Wish You Were Here So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, Blue skys from pain. Can you tell a green field From a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? And did they get you to trade Your heros for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange A walk on part in the war For a lead role in a cage? How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
— Roger Waters
I'll bet she's beautiful, that girl he talks about, and she's got everything that I have to live without... He's the reason for the teardrops on my guitar, the only one who's got enough of me to break my heart. He's the song in the car I keep singing; don't know why I do.
— Taylor Swift
He who sings scares away his woes.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
sometimes we take action, sometimes we take pills.
— Fall Out Boy
My choice is what I choose to do,And if I'm causing no harm, it shouldn't bother you.Your choice is who you choose to be,And if you're causin' no harm, then you're alright with me.
— Ben Harper
Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.
— Lady Gaga
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
— Frédéric Chopin
Oh, I can't help quoting you, because everything that you said rings true.
— Morrissey
I'd love to...but only with you.
— Morrissey
Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.
— Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia
In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have.
— Alex Gaskarth
hello there, the angel from my nightmare.the shadow in the backgroung of the mourge.the unsuspecting victim of darkness in the valley.we could live like jack and sally if we want.
— Blink-182
Thinking of a series of dreamsWhere the time and the tempo flyAnd there's no exit in any direction'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes
— Bob Dylan
The hungry and the haunted explode in a rock'n'roll band.
— Bruce Springsteen
Any good music must be an innovation. 
— Les Baxter
Don't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and use the chanceTo return to innocence.That's not the beginning of the endThat's the return to yourselfThe return to innocence.
— Enigma
I think people who truly can live a life in music are telling the world, ‘You can have my love, you can have my smiles. Forget the bad parts, you don’t need them. Just take the music, the goodness, because it’s the very best, and it’s the part I give most willingly
— George Harrison
A person who...does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of 
— Martin Luther
The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God....Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.
— Martin Luther
The heart has a heart of its own.
— Morrissey
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
— Edith Wharton
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
— Elie Wiesel
I am hated for loving.I am haunted for wanting.
— Morrissey
Can you squeeze me into an empty page of your diary and psychologically save me?
— Morrissey
Droplets of yes and no, in an ocean of maybe.
— Faith No More, Faith No More - The Real Thing
A middle finger is more New York than a corporate ambush. I bleed for my hometown, and I'd die for my fans.
— Lady Gaga
If you've lost your faith in love and music then the end won't be long.
— Pete Doherty
The more you ignore me, the closer I get; you're wasting your time.
— Morrissey
The Monster Ball is by nature a protest: A youth church experience to speak out and celebrate against all forms of discrimination + prejudice.
— Lady Gaga
Through music we may wander where we will in time, and find friends in every century.
— Helen Thompson
Don't be afraid, just play the music.
— Charlie Parker
Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
My body is an ugly masterpiece that lives off the beauty of sound.
— Chad Sugg
I was wasting my life, always thinking about myself.
— Morrissey
The mosh pit will reveal all the answers. The mosh pit never lies.-Norah, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist 
— Rachel Cohn
Some might tell you there's no hope in hand Just because they feel hopeless But you don't have to be a thing like that You be a ship in a bottle set sail 
— Dave Matthews Band
Music is not a fucking soda. It is not a fucking insurance rate. It is not a fucking T-shirt. It 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
I look at him for a moment. Words are a weapon stronger than he knows. And songs are even greater. The words wake the mind. The melody wakes the heart. I come from a people of song and dance. I don’t need him to tell me the power of words. But I smile nonetheless.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
What's my age again?
— Blink-182
The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
— Bruce Springsteen
All I want is someone I can't resist ...I will know all I need to know by the way that I got kissed
— Aerosmith
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?
— Michael  Jackson
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
— Louis Armstrong
What you see is kinda what you get with me. I'm a very real person, or I hope to be, anyway. I don't have nothing to hide
— Kenny Chesney
you dont know what you got till its gone
— Joni Mitchell
[S]he leans into this guy and rocks her head like I’m making this music for her, when if I could, I would take it all away and give her as much silence as she’s given me pain. 
— Rachel Cohn, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
— John Erskine
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
There are no words and there is no singing, but the music has a voice. It is an old voice and a deep voice, like the stump of a sweet cigar or a shoe with a hole. It is a voice that has lived and lives, with sorrow and shame, ecstasy and bliss, joy and pain, redemption and damnation. It is a voice with love and without love. I like the voice, and though I can't talk to it, I like the way it talks to me. It says it is all the same, Young Man. Take it and let it be.
— James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.
— Charles de Lint, The Little Country
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. 
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Don't be afraid to be weakDon't be too proud to be strongJust look into your heart my friendThat will be the return to yourselfThe return to innocenceIf you want, then start to laughIf you must, then start to cryBe yourself don't hideJust believe in destinyDon't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and miss the chanceTo return to innocenceThat's not the beginning of the endThat's the return to yourselfThe return to innocenceDon't care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon't give up and miss the chanceto return to innocence
— Enigma
Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
This sick strange darkness comes creeping on so haunting everytimeAnd as I stared I counted the webs from all the spiderscatching things and eating their insidesLike indecision to call youAnd hear your voice of treasonWill you come home and stop this pain tonightstop this pain tonight
— Blink-182
Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
I think there’s no greater joy than completing a song out of thin air. It’s like inventing something, but it’s invisible, you know? It’s weird. It amazes me. You can send it out in the world, and that’s the joy. It’s like giving birth to all these songs and letting them go like they’re your kids.
— Jason Mraz
I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?
— David Byrne, How Music Works
I mentally shake hands with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy." Mr. Rochester
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
— Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back
— Kenny Chesney
I see the world, it makes me puke,But then I look at you and know,that somewhere there's a someone who can soothe me.
— Morrissey
I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.
— Stephen Fry
The only reason I am successful is because I have stayed true to myself.
— Lindsey Stirling
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
— The Beatles
My love, wherever you are - whatever you are - don't lose faith. I know it's gonna happen someday to you.
— Morrissey
It's so shameful of me: I like you.
— Morrissey
Again, I lay awake, and I cried because of waste.
— Morrissey
I'm tired again, I've tried again, and now my heart is full.And I just can't explain...so I won't even try to.
— Morrissey
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
— Frank Zappa
And make no mistake, my friend, your pointless life will end; but before you go, can you look at the truth?
— Morrissey
In every heart there is a room,A sanctuary safe and strong,To heal the wounds from lovers past,Until a new one comes along
— Billy Joel
Close your eyes, and think of someone you physically admire, and let me kiss you.
— Morrissey
I know by now you think I should have straightened myself out - Thank you, drop dead!
— Morrissey
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
— Ringo Starr
I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely.
— Sarah Dessen
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
— George Bernard Shaw
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
— Edgar Wilson Nye
Concert' doesn’t mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony.
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
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, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.
— Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fall on Your Knees
Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man...California, I'm comin' home.
— Joni Mitchell
If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.
— Mark E. Smith, Renegade
As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I turned to the clarinets. They were a resourceful lot.
— Jennifer Echols, Major Crush
Well, I sort of don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin.
— Jack White
music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, butyou are the musicWhile the music lasts.
— T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.
— Oscar Wilde
Music is not take it or leave it
—  Music is life or death!
I've found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.
— Bryce Anderson
You have to turn it up so that your chest shakes and the drums get in between your ribs like a heartbeat and the bass goes up your spine and fizzles your brain and all you can do is dance or spin in a circle or just scream along because you know that however this music makes you feel, it’s exactly right.
— Robin Benway, Audrey, Wait!
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
— George Eliot
Don't believe everything you hear: Real eyes, Realize, Real lies
— Tupac Shakur
Don't waste your time or time will waste you.
— Muse
The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.
— Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
Music is the soundtrack of our lives.
— Dick Clark
Hair is gray and the firers are burning. So many dreams on the shelf. You say I wanted you to be proud of me. I always wanted that myself.
— Tori Amos
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
— Richard M. Nixon
I try to live without you,everytime I do I feel dead.
— Three Days Grace
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.
— Eddie Van Halen
You don't like me, but you love me; either way, you're wrong.
— Morrissey
Music- what a powerful instrument, what a mighty weapon!
— Maria Augusta von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.
— Pat Conroy, Beach Music
Know I don't hate youDon't wanna fight youKnow I'll always love youBut right now I just don't like youCause you took this too far
— Relient K
Work It Harder Make It BetterDo It Faster, Makes Us strongerMore Than Ever Hour AfterOur Work Is Never Over-Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, lyrics and music by Daft Punk
— Daft Punk
When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
— Rob Sheffield
One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
It was in love I was created, and in love is how I hope I die
— Paolo Nutini
There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleasedWith melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;Some chord in unison with what we hearIs touch'd within us, and the heart replies.
— William Cowper
It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you.
— Neil Young
Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
— Charles Bukowski
I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.
— Martin Luther
I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.
— Morrissey
There's a hard life for every silver spoon.There's a touch of gray for every shade of blue.That's the way I see life.If there was nothing wrong...Then there'd be nothing right.
— Shinedown, Shinedown: The Sound of Madness
Burn down the discoHang the blessed D.J.Because the music that they constantly playIt says nothing to me about my life
— Morrissey
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
— Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
— Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
Music blows lyrics up very quickly, and suddenly they become more than art. They become pompous and they become self-conscious ... I firmly believe that lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you not only have the music, but you've got costume, story, acting, orchestra. There's a lot to take in.
— Stephen Sondheim
Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpointists to hack post-horses; therefore be advised, let well alone and remember the old Italian proverb: Chi sa più, meno sa—Who knows most, knows least.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
— Benjamin Britten
The more you love music, the more music you love.
— Tom Moon, 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die
To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again
— Mary  Stewart, The Hollow Hills
We are not here to do what has already been done.
— Pete Billmann, Thirty Seconds to Mars: A Beautiful Lie
Because you wear a uniform, a smelly uniform...and so you think you can be rude to me.
— Morrissey
The silence gets us nowhere, nowhere way to fast
— Staind
Even I, as sick as I am, I would never be you. Even I, sick and depraved, a traveler to the grave, I would never be you.
— Morrissey
You know I love to spend my mornings, like sunlight dancing on your skin
— Rodney Crowell
Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man's example would be my life's work.
— Eric Clapton
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.
— Nick Hornby
The true mission of the violin is to imitate the accents of the human voice, a noble mission that has earned for the violin the glory of being called the king of instruments
— Charles-Auguste de Beriot
It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead
— Nick Hornby
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
— Franz Liszt
I leave behind this hurricane of f***ing lies
— Green Day, By Green Day American Idiot (Tab) [Paperback]
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
— Guy de Maupassant, Complete Works
People are strange when you're a stranger.
— Jim Morrison
The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.
— Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades
I have my booksAnd my poetry to protect me;I am shielded in my armor,Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.I touch no one and no one touches me.I am a rock,I am an island.
— Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits
The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.
— Frank Zappa
But the Beast was a good person...the Prince looked on the outside the way the Beast was on the inside. Sometimes people couldn't see the inside of the person unless they like the outside of a person. Because they hadn't learned to hear the music yet.
— Karen Kingsbury, Unlocked
You made me feel less alone;you made me feel not quite sodeformed, uninformed and hunchbacked.
— Morrissey
Music is stored in our long-term memory. When we learn something through music, we tend to remember it longer and believe it more deeply. 	Dr. Joyce Brothers
— Joyce Brothers
Questions, I've got some questionsI want to know youBut what if I could ask you only one thingOnly this one time, what would you tell me?Well maybe you could give me a suggestionSo I could know you, what would you tell me?Maybe you could tell me what to ask youBecause then I'd know you, what would you tell mePlease tell me that there's timeTo make this work for all intents and purposesAnd what are your intentions, will you try?Impressions, you've made impressionsThey're going nowhereThey're just going to wait here if you let themPlease don't let themI want to know youAnd if they're going to haunt mePlease collect themPlease just collect themAnd now I'm beggingI'm begging you to ask me just one questionOne simple questionBecause then you'd know meI'll tell you that there's timeTo make this work for all intents and purposesAt least for my ownWhat is a heart worth if it's just left all alone?Leave it long enough and watch it turn into stoneWhy must we always be untrue?
— Jack Johnson, Curious George: Jack Johnson and Friends - Guitar Recorded Version
Im not going to change my ways, just to please you or appease you, inside a crowd five billion proud willing to punch it out, right, wrong, weak strong, ashes to ashes all fall down.
— Dave Matthews Band
Mr. Mancini had a singular talent for making me uncomfortable. He forced me to consider things I’d rather not think about – the sex of my guitar, for instance. If I honestly wanted to put my hands on a woman, would that automatically mean I could play? Gretchen’s teacher never told her to think of her piano as a boy. Neither did Lisa’s flute teacher, though in that case the analogy was obvious. On the off chance that sexual desire was all it took, I steered clear of Lisa’s instrument, fearing that I might be labeled a prodigy.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
If you understand or if you don'tIf you believe or if you doubtThere's a universal justiceAnd the eyes of truthAre always watching you
— Enigma
Anything can become music if listened to long enough
— Jeff Noon
These tears I'm wailing,I spill not without reason.Remove them, my dearest love.Take me to the place I've been dreaming of,where the grotesquely lonely meet the grotesquely lonelyand they whisper,just very softly,Please be mine, Dearest Love.
— Morrissey
There is no such thing as happy music.
— Franz Schubert
A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.
— Kevin Brockmeier
Cold,cold water,surrounds me now,and all I've got is your hand.
— Damien Rice, O
The battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.
— Elvis Costello
I'm a super hero, too, underneath my sweater.
— Rusted Root
Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. Her father had taught her this procedure, and she followed his instructions with a terribly serious look on her face, her eyes narrowed, her breath held in check. Meanwhile, I was on the sofa, watching her every move. Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: It wasn't a record she was handling. It was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
A picture is just a picture, but add music and there's emotion. There's a story.
— L.H. Cosway, Still Life with Strings
We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
— Roger Waters
Good music always defeats bad luck.
— Jack Vance
Try and fail, but never fail to try!
— Jared Leto
You can turn off the sun, but im still ganna shine!
— Jason Mraz
In the end we're all just chalk lines on the concrete Drawn only to be washed away For the time that I've been given I am what I am
— Five Finger Death Punch, Five Finger Death Punch
Lord, I feel so small sometimes in this great big old world.Yeah, I know there are more important things.But don't forget to remember me.
— Carrie Underwood
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
— Tom Waits, The Early Years: The Lyrics, 1971-1983
This world, I am afraid, is designed for crashing bores.
— Morrissey
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. 
— Paul Simon
And all meet in singing, which braids together the different knowings into a wide and subtle music, the music of living. 
— Alison Croggon, The Naming
He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
If you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough -- you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ...And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song.
— Chuck Klosterman
All that you touch All that you see All that you taste All you feel. All that you love All that you hate All you distrust All you save. All that you give All that you deal All that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. All you create All you destroy All that you do All that you say. All that you eat And everyone you meet All that you slight And everyone you fight. All that is now All that is gone All that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon. "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
— Roger Waters
There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.
— Annie Lennox
And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do. 
— Nick Hornby
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
The voice sang on, “I am ready, I am ready, I am fine. I am fine, I am fine, I am fine.” I played it again. I was not fine.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
Follow through.Make your dreams come true.Don't give up the fight.You will be alright.Cause there's no one like you in the universe
— Muse
Music defines us, for it shapes our souls and minds.
— Jessica Carroll
Dance with the Devil
— Breaking Benjamin
In the brightest hour of my darkest day, I realized what is wrong with me"~Forever
— Papa Roach
They can take our homes, our possessions. Our families. Our lives. They can drive us out, like they've driven us out before. They can humiliate us and dehumanize us. But they cannot take our thoughts. They cannot take our talents. They cannot take our knowledge, or our memories, or our minds. In music there is no bondage. Music is a door, and the soul escapes through the melody.
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
You can just enjoy music without understanding it, muusic is a universal language.
— Cl 2ne1
We are stardustBillion-year old carbonAnd we've got to get ourselves back to the garden
— Joni Mitchell, Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics
Sometimes before it gets betterthe darkness gets bigger. The person that you'd take a bullet foris behind the trigger.
— Fall Out Boy
When we feel, a kind of lyric is sung in our heart. When we think, a kind of music is played in our mind. In harmony, both create a beautiful symphony of life.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.
— R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet
There's a club, if you'd like to goYou could meet somebody who really loves you.'So you go, and you stand on your ownAnd you leave on your ownAnd you go home, and you cryAnd you want to die.
— Morrissey
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
An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. 
— Dan Rather
You are the sun, and I'm the moon. In your shadow I can shine.
— Tokio Hotel
I have forgiven Jesus for all of the love he placed in me, when there's no one I can turn to with this love.
— Morrissey
a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment. Which is pretty amazing, when you actually think about it.
— Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Lucivar winced. "She guzzled half the flask — and it wasn't one of his home brews, it was the concoction you created."Jaenelle’s eyes widened. “You let her drink a ‘gravedigger’?”“No no no,” Wilhelmina said, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t ever drink a gravedigger until he’s had a bath.” She smiled placidly when Jaenelle and Lucivar just stared at her.“Mother Night,” Lucivar muttered.“Do you know that song?” Wilhelmina asked Jaenelle.
— Anne Bishop, Queen of the Darkness
There are more than enoughto fight and oppose
— why waste good timefighting the people you like?
Talk about a dream,try to make it real
— Bruce Springsteen
It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
— Johann Sebastian Bach
Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.
— Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty
There are some bad people on the rise
— they're saving their own skins by ruining people's lives.
Music is only love looking for words.
— Lawrence Durrell
Even now - in the final hour of my life -I'm falling in love again.
— Morrissey
Please don't cry one tear for me, I'm not afraid of what I have to say.This is my one and only voice, so listen close... it's only for today.
— Shinedown
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
— Andrew Schweitzer
You say: 'Oh, please forgive'You say: 'Oh, live and let live.'But sorry doesn't help us.Sorry will not save us.Sorry is just a word you find so easy to say (so you say it anyway).Sorry doesn't help us.Sorry won't protect us.Sorry won't undo all the good gone wrong.
— Morrissey
The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse
In every colour there's the light.In every stone sleeps a crystal.Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:Man is the dream of the dolphin
— Enigma
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
I salute to you Commanderand I sneeze'Cause I have Nowan AllergyTo your policies it seemsWhere have we gone wrong America?Mr. Lincoln we can't seemto find you anywhere out of the millionsFrom the desertsTo the mountainsOver prairiesTo the shoresIs this just the Madness of King GeorgeYo GeorgeIs this just the Madness of King GeorgeYo GeorgeWell you have the whole Nationon all fours. 
— Tori Amos
No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself
— Plato
You are what you love not who loves you"- Fall Out Boy
— Fall Out Boy
What's even worse than a flute? - Two flutes!
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
You’ve got that smile,That only heaven can make.I pray to God everyday,That you keep that smile.Yeah, you are my dream,There’s not a thing I won’t do.I'd give my life up for you,'Cause you are my dream.
— Justin Bieber
To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores
— Machado de Assis, The Devil's Church and Other Stories
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
— Jorge Luis Borges
The Universe is making music all the time.
— Tom Waits
Music has power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization.
— Katherine Neville, The Eight
Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man staggers forth, his cane tapping lightlyown the aisle. He leans against the door,raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen. And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like musicshould be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover, inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo seeps through our skin like warm water, we who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching. Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roseson the instrument. His head swooning to each chord exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me has put down her book, closed her eyes, the babyhas stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws will always open to swallow a smile already lost.How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the songlingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human to praise what is fading. But for now, I just want to listen as the train fillscompletely with warm water, and we are all swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart flowing from his hands. I want nothingbut to put my fingers inside his mouth, let that prayer hum through my veins. I want crawl into the hole in his violin.I want to sleep there until my flesh  becomes music.
— Ocean Vuong
They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.
— Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills
For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.
— Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home.""I prefer normal music.""Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse.
— Beth Fantaskey, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side
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
She knew this man's smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
Ah, the magic of music, with it, all things are possible.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
His smile was like a Dylan album and a cup of coffee on a sunny afternoon
— Jen Archer Wood, Point Pleasant
All I can do is read a book to stay awake, and it rips my life away, but it's a great escape.
— Blind Melon
I used to dream, and I used to vow;I wouldn't dream of it now.
— Morrissey
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Satan rejected my soul; as low as he goes,he never quite goes this low.
— Morrissey
A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
Rehearsals and practice times by myself are like these little islands of 'Okay' in a vast sea of 'Holy Crap!
— Jordan Sonnenblick
You know what punk is? a bunch of no-talent guys who really, really want to be in a band. Nobody reads music, nobody plays the mandolin, and you're too dumb to write songs about mythology or Middle-earth. So what's your style? Three chords, cranked out fast and loud and distorted because your instruments are crap and you can't play them worth a damn. And you scream your lungs out to cover up the fact that you can't sing. It should suck, but here's the thing - it doesn't. Rock and roll can be so full of itself, but not this. It's simple and angry and raw.
— Gordon Korman, Born to Rock
I could never be your godAnd I don't even think I want the job anymore
— Stone Sour
You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.
— Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
And my head told my heart"Let love grow"But my heart told my head"This time noThis time no
— Mumford & Sons
If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.
— Confucius
There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief...
— Bob Dylan
The ribbon on my wrist says: Do not open before Christmas.
— Fall Out Boy