Quotes & Sayings About Music From Shakespeare

I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music. — William Shakespeare

How soar sweet music is, when time is broke, and no proportion kept! — William Shakespeare

Give me mine angle, we'll to th' river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up, I'll think them every one an Antony, And say, 'Ah, ha! are caught!' — William Shakespeare

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds. — William F. Buckley Jr.

The earth has music for those that listen. — William Shakespeare

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni. — W. H. Auden

(aside) Oh, you are well tuned now,
But I'll set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am. — William Shakespeare

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening. — Captain Beefheart

More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past — William Shakespeare

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy. — Al Pacino

Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical. — Diane Paulus

Had rather hear you to solicit that Than music from the spheres. — William Shakespeare

He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology - Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear. — Walter Isaacson

This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it. — William Shakespeare

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society. — Tyler Cowen

Feste. Are you ready, sir?

Orsino. Ay; prithee, sing.
[Music] 945
SONG.

Feste. Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 950
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet 955
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where 960
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!
Orsino. There's for thy pains.
Feste. No pains, sir: I take pleasure in singing, sir.

Orsino. I'll pay thy pleasure then. 965

Feste. Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another.

From Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 4. — William Shakespeare

This rough magic I here abjure and when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses that this airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book. — William Shakespeare

I am never merry when I hear sweet music. — William Shakespeare

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere - not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs! — Sinclair Lewis

One whom the music of his own vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony. — William Shakespeare

Ah, Juliet, if the measure of thy joy
Be heaped like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbours air, and let rich music's tongue
Unfold the imagined happiness that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter. — William Shakespeare

I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time. — Emilie Autumn

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony — William Shakespeare

By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
but music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
and his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. — William Shakespeare

If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. — Martin Luther King Jr.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. — William Shakespeare

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring [making music] to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it. — William Shakespeare

There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity — Lafcadio Hearn

I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop. — Jill Scott

If music be the food of love, play on rock on . William Shakespeare

- love evolution — Michelle Mankin

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. — Christopher Hitchens

Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once. — William Shakespeare

And in some perfumes there is more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound. — William Shakespeare

I went to the Guilford School of Music and Drama, which was affiliated with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was lucky enough to be taught by a beautiful, wonderful teacher called Patsy Rodenberg, who works a lot with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a voice coach and technician. — Rhys Ifans

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry. — Tamsin Greig

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. — Virginia Woolf

The setting sun, and the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in rememberance more than long things past. — William Shakespeare

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right. — Marianne Williamson

Music oft hath such a charm
To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. — William Shakespeare

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it. — Andrew Denton

When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested. — Pablo Casals

Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words. — Mandy Patinkin

Preposterous ass, that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
Was it not to refresh the mind of man
After his studies or his usual pain?
(The Taming of the Shrew, 3.1.10-13), Lucentio — William Shakespeare

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland. — Haruki Murakami

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380) — William Shakespeare

Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German. — E. M. Forster

Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare. — William Shakespeare

Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music. — Jeff Britting

Music, moody food
Of us that trade in love. — William Shakespeare

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature. — Anne Stevenson

To die, is to be banish'd from myself;
And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her,
Is self from self: a deadly banishment!
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?
Unless it be to think that she is by,
And feed upon the shadow of perfection.
Except I be by Silvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale;
Unless I look on Silvia in the day,
There is no day for me to look upon;
She is my essence, and I leave to be,
If I be not by her fair influence
Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive. — William Shakespeare

Give me some music! Now, good morrow, friends! — William Shakespeare

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing; To his music, plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die. — William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love, play on. 1 Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, 2 The appetite may sicken and so die. 3 That strain again! It — William Shakespeare

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words. — Philip Pullman

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress. — William Shakespeare

I will play the swan. And die in music. — William Shakespeare

Music can minister to minds diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with its sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the full bosom of all perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. — William Shakespeare