Quotes & Sayings About Emotion And Music

They drive our behaviors and control our moods. If music is emotion expressed in the medium of sound, flavor is emotion expressed in the medium of food. — Mark Schatzker

I think that some of the best Crowes stuff we did had that spontaneous vibe. Thats something thats always interested me in music. Im not really the kind of person to get too bogged down in the details. I think that takes away from the emotion and the vibe of what youre doing. — Chris Robinson

A picture is just a picture, but add music and there's emotion. There's a story. — L. H. Cosway

Beethoven
his thoughts moving at
the speed of sound
transforming emotion into music
and for a moment
it was like joy
was a tangible thing
like you could touch it
like for the first time
we could watch love and
hate dance together
in a waltz of such precision and beauty
that we finally understood
the history wasn't important
to know the man
all we ever had to do was
listen. — Shane Koyczan

The human voice was the first instrument and remains the most powerful and effective method of musical creation and emotional transference. — Deke Sharon

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance. — Carl Maria Von Weber

The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself ... Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel. — George Gershwin

With charity, money is purified. By service, our actions are purified. With music, our emotions are purified and with knowledge our intellect is purified. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book. — Chris Raschka

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator's felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney — Siri Hustvedt

A fragrance is a veritable story, told and explained in scent, in notes, in impressions. It's a score based on the emotions of each instant, a captivating music of the senses. — Alber Elbaz

While ritual, emotion and reasoning are all significant aspects of human nature, the most nearly unique human characteristic is the ability to associate abstractly and to reason. Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species; and the most characteristically human activities are mathematics, science, technology, music and the arts
a somewhat broader range of subjects than is usually included under the "humanities." Indeed, in its common usage this very word seems to reflect a peculiar narrowness of vision about what is human. Mathematics is as much a "humanity" as poetry. — Carl Sagan

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you've got white, pick it where you've got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you'll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.? — Les Paul

My music is rock. I listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers and I listen to one of my songs, and if I don't give you the same emotion, then I go back and re-spit. — Kanye West

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album. — Aimee Mann

The way that I write songs is pretty simple. I hear music first, much like you would when you're scoring a film. I usually hear a soundtrack in my head, and after I get that soundtrack, it tells me what it's about, what it feels like, what the emotion is, and the words come after. — Lauren Hart

When you hear my music and you feel the emotion, it's real. When you see me in a film and you see a tear, it's real. — Jennifer Hudson

Music can help you through any kind of emotion. It can help you through a break-up, make you dance, or help you realize or understand something about yourself ... and if I can sing a song and make someone feel those things then I will feel like I have made a difference. — Hollie Cavanagh

When we remove all emotion, all judgement, and all expectation there is only love left. Love is found in the stillness of the soul. Love is without action, without attachment or need. Love is the subtle energy that flows through all of creation. Love transcends your being into ascension. Love is the harmony and the music of the universe, love is all there is. — L.J. Vanier

Music is an emotion, and I put it out there. — Daron Malakian

It's amazing to hear, as a voice matures and then starts to decline, what kind of emotion is still conveyed by a really good vocalist. — Tom Wopat

Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. — James Burke

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic. — Yanni

The emotion is the music and the script is the libretto. — Gregory Peck

Jesus, music has always been my first love. I use music in my work because it's the fastest way to an emotional place. You hear a song, and that memory comes right back
you're there ... Making music is immediate, and it's all about you. If you're playing guitar, the feeling comes through
the way you bend the note, the intensity with which you hit the strings. With making films, although it's real emotion, it's false emotion. You're lying. — Johnny Depp

Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion. — Greg Lake

I don't know notes or octaves or the difference between sharp and flat, but I know music makes everything more. — Sarah Tomp

Music just affects people's feelings. It brings out emotions in you and makes you happy and sad. — Selena Gomez

Music isn't just a bunch of notes strung together, sweetheart. It's life. It's memory. Songs trigger specific and often predictable emotional reactions. Music's an expression of emotion, desires. — J.D. Robb

But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time. — Julie Anne Long

I think the emotion that song carries makes it good. Because you have to produce around something - an emotional attachment and a feeling. The melody itself has a feeling in it. The keys, the tones, frequency, sonics, all of those have feelings in it. Like, it's the ghost within, the music itself. That's what makes the song even have a possibility of being great. The emotional connection. Because if you don't have that, I don't think you really have a song. — The-Dream

Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you'll eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love. — Tom Burns

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed. — Chris Ware

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream. — Anais Nin

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union. — Eduard Hanslick

Music doesn't hurt anybody, that's what's amazing. Everything is in there, every kind of human emotion, from the darkest to the lightest. And it has power. Unbelievable power. — Bill Frisell

The music of Beethoven's Fidelio always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I'm afraid, purely factitious--unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie's joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament. — William Maxwell

I knew that I wanted to be a singer/songwriter when I was much younger and, um, I've been able to, you know, to realize that dream and I'm very pleased with that ... I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry ... Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing emotion-very powerful emotions. — Annie Lennox

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. — Constantine P. Cavafy

Music has always been such an amazing tool for me to access self and emotion. — Matisyahu

It was all the things I wanted my music to be, but yet it wasn't grand and it wasn't obtuse - it wasn't overshooting, it wasn't undershooting, it was precise. The lyrics and the way that I was able to extract and excavate emotion within me. — Justin Vernon

Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach. — Karen DeCrow

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. — Michel Houellebecq

I march over and turn it on because I need music when I work. Hell, I need music all the time, but especially when I work. Music grounds me. It's pure emotion and I need that extension. — Kim Holden

It was as if his song was one voice, calling out into the darkness until it was answered by another, harmonizing with its own unique voice and emotion to create something even more beautiful than the sum of its parts. — Erik Tomblin

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion. — Jimi Hendrix

Any performer tries to perform music as if for the first time, with all that energy and excitement that comes from discovering a new piece--maybe trying to recreate the memory of falling in love with a piece when hearing it first as a child--and just as people regularly say of a brilliant conductor that they seem to conduct as if recreating the energy an audience must have felt when the piece was first played decades, even centuries, before, so too I think we need to communicate our knowledge with the passion we first encountered as children. — Armando Iannucci

Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song. — LeAnn Rimes

The cinema that I make is a cinema about people, emotion, humanity and passion. It's not just about what they struggle through, but what they live for. That's what I love. The music they love, the people they love, the clothing, the hair and the life that they love — David O. Russell

I think that's the great thing about music: It can communicate emotionally. And you don't have to necessarily get all of the words. I mean you have to know what is being said, but didn't you find even if you didn't get all of the words, you certainly get the emotion? — Ronny Cox

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions. — Pattiann Rogers

It's not just something that you do intellectually when you do music. You do it with your body, and you do it with your emotions, and you do it with every part of yourself. It engages your mind as well, but engages all parts of yourself. — Joan Osborne

Music is life! It's physical emotion-you can touch! It's neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into soundwaves for your ears to swallow. — Isaac Marion

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Music is an emotion and it makes you feel a certain way. Some songs make you want to dance, while some make you think. Some songs are positive, while some people see those songs as negative. — Lil' Flip

The holy trifecta of directing and filmmaking is character emotion, camera movement and music. When you hit those three, that's magical. That's what I'm trying to do. — David O. Russell

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory. — Oliver Sacks

In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson — Eric Blehm

It is natural to speak of hymns as "poems," indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. There can be poetry without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must not. In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual feelings and desires. The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in its strain. — Hezekiah Butterworth

It's more like you write what comes to you ... You try to reflect the mood of the songs. Take 'Rearviewmirror', we start off with the music and it kinds of propels the lyrics. It made me feel like I was in a car, leaving something, a bad situation. There's an emotion there. I remembered all the times I wanted to leave ... — Eddie Vedder

It's of course important to mention that when DJing, I'm building my own story through the music. I'm figuring out what song to play next, what song to play after that, and how the two will blend together. How the emotion is going to develop from one song to another. So I first build that storyline. — Steve Aoki

Emotions of any kind can be evoked by melody and rhythm; therefore music has the power to form character. — Aristotle.

To me, music is emotion and if when you're listening to it and it doesn't make you feel that, then it's not music. — Austin Carlile

All the men in Daddy's records sang of love with drastically imbalanced emotion. In the span of three minutes, they begged for it and kicked it to the curb. They turned to anybody, even to God, with a perpetual request: Please send me someone to love. But once they got it, love scrambled them. — Rashod Ollison

An actor can do a play on Broadway for three years. Every night he's expressing the same emotion in exactly the same way. He has developed a technique to convey those feelings so that he can get the ideas across. Or a musician may not want to play that damn music at all, but he has a booking and has to do it. — Richard Estes

Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement. — Tiffany Madison

For some reason, she thought of how the old people wept when they played fado music at the annual Portuguese Festival. Saudade , her great-aunt Del called it: homesick music. But according to her father, the emotion was about more than place. It was a profound longing for everything that was lost and would never be regained. — Patry Francis

There is so much more to the notes being strum from his guitar, behind everything is raw emotion, and it's proof that he is human. That his heart beats just like mine and that sadness can infiltrate those that appear to have souls made out of stone. — Melissa Grijalva

The fact that I do place music at the end of my films is not to accentuate the emotion. It serves an opposite purpose which is to remove them from the emotional space and allow them to enter a space of thinking, because I believe that when the audience is watching the film they're watching it with their feelings. — Asghar Farhadi

Often times, music is used to evoke an emotion and it's become a cliche, so I don't want to do that, and actually what I do, is that emotional intensity that has developed throughout the film, I allow it to get released by having that music at the end with the credits. — Asghar Farhadi

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing emotion - very powerful emotions. That's what draws millions of people towards it. And, um, I found myself always going for these darker places and - people identify with that. — Annie Lennox

Singing is a way of releasing an emotion that you sometimes can't portray when you're acting. And music moves your soul, so music is the source of the most intense emotions you can feel. — Amanda Seyfried

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power. — Hugh Reginald Haweis

I could see us sitting at the old piano, while he tried to explain how music worked. I could see the Iron glamour in the notes, the strict lines and rigid rules that made up the score, but the music itself was a vortex of song and pure, swirling emotion. They weren't separate entities, creative magic and Iron glamour. They were one; cold logic and wild emotion, merged together to create something truly beautiful. — Julie Kagawa

I've stopped showing actors what to actually do. I rather just talk to them about it. Then I usually play music. That's a great way to convey inner emotion, bring the power of style and acting together. That's really what it is, very good acting without talking. — Nicolas Winding Refn

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. — Stanley Kubrick

When I see a movie, the music often gets in the way for me. It's something that, say, for myself and Claire, we never, ever speak about. We never speak about describing emotion. I think it's about color and movement. And I think it's important to let the images be the melody, as well, a lot of the time - to create a kind of a backing for that, to let it sing. — Stuart A. Staples

To possess and exercise omniscience is to never have sensed temperature, experienced a single emotion, or practiced a single vice. It is to have never been amazed, concerned, analytical, or sympathetic. By exercising omniscience, an Omni-maximum being could not move, be moved, or inspired. Such a being could not interfere, empathise, interject, alter, adjust, or give advice. Ever. Such a being could not devise a plan, hear music, imagine a story, or recognise art or deviancy in any guise, for it could never differentiate creativity from cold reality. Such a being could not know doubt, desire, success, or failure. It could not, therefore, know itself, and if it is incapable of that, then it is incapable of experiencing pleasure. — John Zande

For me, music is all about emotion and attitude. — Peter Criss

I love musical theater so much. When done right, I think comedy songs can be the most efficient form of joke delivery. Songs can be the most efficient and the best forms of conveying emotion. Music is universal. It's worldwide. — Rachel Bloom

My hands moved up and down the keyboard, summoning great waves of music, each one crested with sorrow, loneliness, and anger. Tides of emotion rose and fell, gradually finding their way down my arms and to the keys, becoming harmonies that filled and then dissipated into the air like mist. — Sarah Beard

Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music. — Keith Sweat

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways? — Chance The Rapper

All the big pop acts that I've been into over the years - whether it's ABBA or Prince - managed to combine amazing melodies and honest human emotion. But coming out of the super-super-commerical pop industry in the 90s, maybe people forgot about the fact that pop music can do both of those things. — Robyn

Music and fashion go hand in hand. I think music inspires all types of arts; it inspires life, emotion, mood, and all of those things are reflected in my fashion and my style. One doesn't go without the other. — Rihanna

Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by ... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once? — Eli Siegel

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity — G.H. Hardy

The music is an important and crucial part to an animated film. You don't think about it, but you can watch Tom and Jerry with no words, for hours, and the music dictates the emotion and where the story is going and how you're supposed to feel. Everything is in the music. — Rihanna

Music is to be praised as second only to the Word of God because by her all the emotions are swayed. That is why there are so many songs and psalms. This precious gift has been bestowed on men alone to remind them that they are created to praise and magnify the Lord. — Martin Luther

I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the
women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all
weekend and listen to classical music. — Helen Fielding

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It's the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. — Gloria Steinem

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

I love lots of different types of music, but it's music that has this up-swelling of beauty and emotion that is most important to me. — Moby

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance. — Leo Tolstoy

Find it incredible impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks's "Landslide," especially the lyric: "I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you." I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don't cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox. — Mindy Kaling

Music is always around, and it helps to heighten any emotion. — Tyler Perry

Without the emotion and willingness of Spirit, our music becomes dry and dusty - without life. Without doctrinal bones as a skeleton, the Body is not enfleshed in a healthy way. — Marva Dawn

rhythmic drums were pumping waves of emotion into both of them. Her lusty eyes looked at him with a penetrating stare. Fionna's naked breasts pressed against Dick as they came together to dance. Dick faced Fionna and he held her tight. His naked rippling muscles pushed against her firm aroused female flesh. Dick danced with his wife Fionna. Then he grabbed the guitar to stroke a few chords of ecstasy. Another man was pounding the drums while Fionna danced naked in front of the live audience. Fionna made harmony with Dick as the throbbing beat made her explode with excitement and pleasure. He touched her deep inside with his music. He made love to her with his instrument. Each stroke of the guitar was like a motion of erotic love. Dick made her feel as if her body was quivering inside. — Fionna Free Man

They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions. — Thomas Cahill