Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST...
-- Frank Zappa 

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it suseptible to divine influences.
-- Thomas Mace (17th century), transmitted to Gita Sarabhai, as told to John Cage

Music is silence, singing.
-- Robert Fripp 

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-- Aldous Huxley 

"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, Jr.

My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard.
-- John Cage

Without music life would be a mistake.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) German philosopher

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.
-- Ron Wood

Music is far too important to be left in the hands of professionals.
-- Anonymous

Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.
-- E.Y. Harburg (Edgar Yipsel) (1898 - 1981) 

Music is the cup that holds the wine of silence.
-- Robert Fripp

Music is a means of rapid transportation.
-- John Cage 

We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.
-- Karlheinz Stockhausen

You can realign people's physical chemistry with sound.
-- Bob Mould

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

Music is going to break the way because music is in a spiritual thing of its own. It's like the waves of the ocean. You can't just cut out the perfect wave and take it home with you.
-- Jimi Hendrix

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
-- Igor Stravinsky

All music comes from God.
-- Johnny Cash 

Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.
-- Duke Ellington

Number is the Word but is not utterance; it is wave and light, though no one sees it; it is rhythm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each form of life is a particular reverberation of Number.
-- Maurice Druon From the Memoirs of Zeus

It's all one big note.
-- Frank Zappa's description of the universe. 

Music is the performance of sound. Theatre is the performance of appearance. Try not to confuse the two.
-- Coyote's advice to students

Performance is a vehicle for entering different worlds of experiencing.
-- Robert Fripp 

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.
-- Artur Schnabel 

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
-- Miles Davis

Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read.
-- Frank Zappa 

I read on the Internet that I was dead.
-- Fiona Apple

The only person you have to think about lying twice to is either yourself or to God. The press isn't either of them. And I just figured they're irrelevant.
-- Bob Dylan 

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
-- Mel Brooks 

If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
-- Oscar Wilde 

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

The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.
--"Smile" Zingers

I would like, with the sun shining through the window on a crisp early-autumnal mid-morning, with a sufficiency of Monster Cappucino flowing in my veins to prompt minimal sentience, to declare my view for the record that Drummer Jokes are a cruel and pernicious form of humour introduced to the world by under-humoured persons lacking in sensitivity and concern for other drummers.
-- Robert Fripp

The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!
-- Panama Francis

There is a difference between being a timekeeper and keeping the pulse or being in step with the pulse in the band.
-- Robert Fripp

Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.
-- Dizzy Gillespie 

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
-- Louis Armstrong

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
-- Louis Armstrong

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
-- Ornette Coleman

We never play anything the same way once.
-- Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians 

Composition is frozen improvisation.
-- Igor Stravinsky

Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already.
-- Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.
-- Frank Zappa

You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
-- Frank Zappa 

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
-- Mark Twain

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.
-- James Gibbons Hunekar

If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.
-- Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
-- Sergei Prokofiev 

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
-- Frank Zappa

I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
-- Dimitri Mitropolous

Conducting'' is when you draw "designs'' in the nowhere -- with your stick, or with your hands -- which are interpreted as "instructional messages'' by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.
-- Frank Zappa

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
-- Richard Strauss

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
-- Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

Already too loud!
-- Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't.
-- Al Cohn  

Music is a very hard instrument.
-- Vido Musso 

Practice at home. Rehearse with the band. Perform for the audience.
-- Wes Houston to a bass player who wouldn't stop noodling during a rehearsal

The disgusting stink of a too loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time.
-- Frank Zappa 

I never killed anyone with my tuba.
-- Bill Barber, on his experience in World War II

The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'
-- (unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band)

If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton.
-- Chet Baker

I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gon' keep playin'.
-- Clark Terry

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students' creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.
-- Herbie Hancock

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
--Luciano Pavarotti

I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.
-- Niccoló Paganini

What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats.
-- Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan.

Oh, look! It's my friends, the chairs!
-- Tiny Tim, upon seeing a near-empty house

I see we have a very selective audience tonight.
-- Jim Hall, playing to a half-empty house

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.
-- Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
-- Frederic Chopin

When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
--Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

In opera, there is always too much singing.
-- Claude Debussy

Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!
-- Giacchino Rossini

The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong.
-- Tony Bennett

What we play is life.
-- Louis Armstrong

Whether you are playing in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.
-- Carlos Santana 

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
-- Van Morrison 

Until I started running in this music business, I had never lived around no people that would kill they own brother, like, for a lousy dollar, or would rob they own family for a few nickels.
-- Big Bill Broonzy

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
-- Hunter S. Thompson

Honest songs aren`t written for money.
-- Pete Seeger

Nobody looks good bent over. Especially to pick up a check.
-- Frank Zappa

When a record company makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When the artist makes a mistake, the artist pays for it.
-- Robert Fripp

I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.
-- Xavier Cugat 

One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music.
-- Jack Daney

[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.
-- Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living.
-- Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

To be a musician is a curse. To NOT be one is even worse.
-- Jack Daney