Decca Recording Company
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." [regarding the Beatles in 1962]

Dello Joio, Norman
"Music is in a state of decline. This state reflects the world's confusion with the recognisable future. As a composer, I believe that the creative arts as well as all branches of learning should serve as an instrument for a moral and spiritual renaissance. Unless this challenge is met now, man's hope for freedom and liberation from fear shall always be an illusion."

Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
"The whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists."

Domingo, Placido (1941- )
"The high note is not the only thing."

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859-1930)
"Critics kind -- never mind! Critics flatter -- no matter! Critics blame -- all the same! Do your best -- damn the rest!"

Dryden, John (1631-1700)
"What passion cannot music raise and quell?"

Durrell, Lawrence
"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness."

Dvorak, Antonin (1841-1904)
"Mozart is sweet sunshine."

Eastman, Max Forrester (1883-1969)
"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."

Einstein, Albert (1879-1955)
"Achieve greatness in choir: in art, and in the higher ranges of science, there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavour. There is no true greatness in art of science without that sense of harmony."

"If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music ... I get most the joy in life out of music."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge; for knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the entire world."

[re theory of relativity] "It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."

"The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

Eliot, George, Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880)
"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)
"By the delicate, invisible web you wove the inexplicable mystery of sound."

Ellington, Duke (Edward Kennedy) (1899-1974)
"I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."

"I have a mistress. Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays. She is beautiful and gentle. She is a swinger. She has grace. To hear her speak, you can't believe your ears. She is 10,000 years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand new woman every day, and as endless as time mathematics. Living with her is a labyrinth of ramifications. I look forward to her every gesture. Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to none."

Erskine, John Lord
"Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing."

Faulkner, William (1897-1962)
"I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express . . . but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better."

Fenby, Eric
[from Delius As I Knew Him] "Yet there is one thing the world with all its rottenness cannot take from us, and that is the deep abiding joy and consolation perpetuated in great music. Here the spirit may find home and relief when all else fails."

Film Company
"Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." [Fred Astaire's 1928 screen test verdict]

Fischer, Ernst Kuno (1824-1907)
"Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die."

Floyd, Doug
"You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note."

Foss, Lukas (1922- )
"Composing is like making love to the future."

Fripp, Robert
"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."

Frost, Robert (1874-1963)
"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."

Gardner, Ed
"Opera -- that's when someone on stage is stabbed, and instead of bleeding he sings."

Genet, Jean
"Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me."

Gershwin, George (1898-1937)
"True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today."

Gibran, Kahlil
"You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832)
"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words."

Grant, General Ulysses Simpson (1822-1885)
"I only know two tunes: one of them is 'Yankee Doodle,' the other one isn't."

Halpern, Steven
"When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society the noise level is such that is keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment."

Hammarskjold, Dag (1905-1961)
"It whispers: all is waiting here, kept safe for thee, year after year, beautiful songs in thousands; where hast thou been, where, where?"

Harburg, E.Y.
"Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought."

Haydn, Franz Josef (1732-1809)
"It is the melody which is the chosen of music, and it is that which is most difficult to produce. The invention of a fine melody is a work of genius."

Heifetz, Jascha (1899-1987)
"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

Heine, Heinrich
"When words leave off, music begins."

Henze, Hans Werner (1926- )
"Between Stravinsky and Webern everything that still passes itself off as a symphony seems either a replica, an obituary, or an echo."

Heschel, Abraham Joshua
"Listening to great music is a shattering experience, throwing the soul into an encounter with an aspect of reality to which the mind cannot ever relate itself adequately. Such experiences undermine conceit and complacency and even induce a sense of contrition and a readiness for repentence. I am neither a musician nor an expert on music. But the shattering experience of music has been a challenge to my thinking on ultimate issues. I spend my life working with thoughts. And one problem that gives me no rest is: do these thoughts ever rise to the heights reached by authentic music?"

Hesse, Hermann
"I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable."

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
"Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God."

"When the words come, they are merely empty shells without the music. They live as they are sung, for the words are the body and the music the spirit."

Hiller, Ferdinand (1811-1885)
"Music would have no right to exist as an art, if that which it expresses could be painted in oil or rendered by so many words."

Hindemith, Paul (1895-1963)
"There are only twelve tones. You must treat them carefully."

Hoffer, Eric
"It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites -- opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity -- where energies flow smoothly in one direction -- there will be much doing but no music."

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894)
"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."

Howard, Harlan
"Country music is three chords and the truth."

Hugo, Victor Marie, Vicomte (1802-1885)
"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."

Huxley, Aldous (1894-1963)
"Music is, after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible."

Ibrahim, Abdullah
"The whole of Africa moves in time to music. We sow seeds to music and we sing songs to the corn to make it grow and to the sky to make it rain. Then we reap our harvest to the sound of music and song."

Isidore of Seville (568-636)
"Nothing exists without music, for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of that harmony."

Italian Proverb
"God save me from a bad neighbour and a beginner on the fiddle."