Music Has Power Quotes & Sayings

I met people that I couldn't talk to - they didn't speak Spanish or English - but they knew my songs. That's what I love, the music has gone past where I thought it would get to. That's the power of music, how it can travel and break language barriers. — Prince Royce

Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift hearts and awaken our souls ... . — James A. Murphy

Music is a great blessing. It has the power to elevate and liberate us. It sets people free to dream. It can unite us to sing with one voice. Such is the value of music. — Nelson Mandela

Music has power to create a universe or to destroy a civilization. — Katherine Neville

Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young. — Aristotle.

What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector. — Jacques Attali

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary. — Martin Luther

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation. — Derek Bailey

We usually forget that apart from making a living on this earth, human beings live in societies and these societies have cultures. It is only through having cultures that mankind on this earth has an ordered and meaningful life. Music and drama are two of the many important manifestation of a culture. They are important because they represent the expressions emanating from the power of human artistic creativity — Tunku Abdul Rahman

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies. — Tom Robbins

A man in Mali told me that there are seven senses. Everyone has five, some can use their sixth. But not everyone has the seventh. It is the power to heal with music, calm with color, to soothe the sick soul with harmony. He told me that I have this gift, and I know what I have to do with it. — Marie Daulne

My soul, I've found, has puppet strings
to make me droop or give me wings.
And music is the puppeteer
that turns my ear to hear. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music-that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of life. — Georg Solti

Ani DiFranco or Ani, as she is universally know to her fans, was, to a certain kind of white, middle-class woman, girl power in the purest sense. At twenty, she founded her own record label, Righteous Babe. She's released dozens of albums (and has sold over four million copies), had a baby, documented her life on the road, and opened for Bob Dylan. — Marisa Meltzer

I think we listen to music because we want to be changed. Music is not solely for our entertainment. Music has such tremendous power to bring joy. To me, that's our job as artists. Not happiness, not a groove, whatever. You must bring joy. I think that's the assignment. I have no doubt about it. — Bobby McFerrin

I just want the songs to have the staying power as my favorite songs. If you listen to any Hank Williams song, when you're in a good mood, it's going to put you in a better mood. If you happen to be bummed-out, you're going to feel maybe a little more bummed-out and better at the same time. At any time in my life, his music has had meaning and value to me. If a song can shape-shift in that way, that's a sign of success. — M. Ward

What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security. — Garrison Keillor

I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's
because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged. — Oliver Sacks

We've all seen the power music has to spread messages of solidarity and hope. — Conor Oberst

Music has the power to unite us. It proves that by working together, we can create something truly beautiful. — Pinchas Zukerman

The first thing to consider is education. This is divided into two parts, music and gymnastics. Each has a wider meaning than at present: 'music' means everything that is in the province of the muses, and 'gymnastics' means everything concerned with physical training and fitness. 'Music' is almost as wide as what we should call 'culture', and 'gymnastics' is somewhat wider than what we call 'athletics'. Culture is to be devoted to making men gentlemen, in the sense which, largely owing to Plato, is familiar in England. The Athens of his day was, in one respect, analogous to England in the nineteenth century: there was in each an aristocracy enjoying wealth and social prestige, but having no monopoly of political power; and in each the aristocracy had to secure as much power as it could by means of impressive behaviour. — Anonymous

Music is a mantra that soothes the soul ... something our body has to have. It's important to understand the power of music. — Michael Jackson

Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time, — Questlove

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself. — John Luther Adams

If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together. — Raoul Vaneigem

Music with all its subtlety has immense power to unite people, spread love and bring peace in the world! — Sanchita Pandey

Music has the power to bring people together like no other art form. — Michael Franti

A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community. — Martin O'Malley

I think the power of opera has been shifted from the music to the director, because this is a very visual age that we live in. — Sondra Radvanovsky

Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening.
"Where's the cloakroom?"
"The what?"
"The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom."
"What's your problem?"
"We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom."
"Fuck."
Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you. — Tony Wilson

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know. — Renata Adler

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 remember when my father was dying, I remember listening to Bjork, and listening to John Coltrane, and these things, and I don't know why but music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up just a little bit. — Wayne Coyne

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs. — Edward Abbey

Music has this emotional thing to it, and it touches people in crazy ways. The power of having that power is something that, once you have it, you don't want it to ever end. — Gwen Stefani

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has the ability to take you from placidity to power in one sonic breath. It is music of dignity and strength, with primitive, energetic passages, evoking absolute beauty from the simplest of phrases. It brings up something that has everything to do with significance - squeezing joy and motif that you just can't drop - it stays with you. — Robert Genn

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth. — Daryl Hall

Everyone has a struggle in life, and the question is do you allow yourself to be overcome by it or do you master it with unified strength and power. This is exactly what the music was meant to do, to transend your normal world, to make you more than what you are, to make you set down your burden for a while. Feel powerful, feel invincible, feel indestructible; believe in something as opposed to believing in nothing; spread the sickness, infect the world. — David Draiman

Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has. — Mary J. Blige

Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. — Haruki Murakami

Music is more powerful than reason in the soul. That is also why Plato made music the very first step in his long educational curriculum: good music was to create the harmony of soul that would be a ripe field for the higher harmony of reason to take root in later. And that is also why he said that the decay of the ideal state would begin with a decay in music. In fact, one of your obscure modern scholars has shown that social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by musical revolutions, and why another sage said, 'Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws. — Peter Kreeft

I've learned much from the land of many gods and many ways to worship. From Buddhism the power to begin to manage my mind, from Jainism the desire to make peace in all aspects of life, while Islam has taught me to desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled. I thank Judaism for teaching me the power of transcendence in rituals and the Sufis for affirming my ability to find answers within and reconnecting me with the power of music. Here's to the Parsis for teaching me that nature must be touched lightly, and the Sikhs for the importance of spiritual strength ... And most of all, I thank Hinduism for showing me that there are millions of paths to the divine. — Sarah Macdonald

This is a uni-verse ("one song'). There's one song playing everywhere and we are all notes in it. There are no "special" or "better" notes.Every note is necessary and contains the whole essence of the music. All the power and substance of the universe is seeking to sing its song through you as magnificently as it has ever been sung before. — Derek Rydall

In the end, the record companies have the power to control the quality that is served online. Online service has been problematic in that it actively or discreetly promotes trading and duplication of music. It is not offensive to me that the MP3-quaility sound is traded around. It is, in my opinion, the new radio and serves a great purpose: making music lovers away of the content tat is out there to buy. If the consumers want it, let tham take it, whatever quality they prefer. Ultimately, nothing can stop absolute quality from making a big comeback. The stage is well set. I believe in what I am trying to do and that good Karma will come from it.
It is just a matter of time. — Neil Young

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place. — Robert McKee

It feels like I am covering all aspects of what I do and operating in the gift God gave me. I believe God has freed me up to go in some other places because I am responsible and understand the power of music. — Regina Belle

Music has a great power for bringing people together. With so many forces in this world acting to drive wedges between people, it's important to preserve those things that help us experience our common humanity. — Ted Turner

There's a power that movies and music has, that can move you and motivate you to look at your neighbor in a slightly more respectful way, and look at cultures in a more inclusive way. — Hans Zimmer

I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make man happy. — Siegbert Tarrasch

The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement ... The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys ... Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up. Because music has a metaphysical quality it really makes your life beautiful. — Wayne Coyne

The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power. — Henry Rollins

Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss. — Twyla Tharp

It feels as though these things happened just yesterday. Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely they hurt. — Haruki Murakami

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death - then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don't you see, this is just the point - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful. — Boris Pasternak

What is an obsession? It is a form of programming that has gotten completely out of hand. Religious fanatics are a prime example, as are those people who become enveloped in a political concept. Most of man's progress has come about as a result of obsessions. The Wright brothers were not just tinkerers with an idea; their idea swallowed them up. Most leaders are obsessed with power or possessed by egos so large their only concern is their place in history. I have known writers obsessed with a single subject. Like Bobby Fischer and chess, anything and everything outside their subject seems meaningless. Any art form - music, painting, dance - is done best by those who are completely possessed by it. Such possession often borders on madness. This world would be a sorry place without such madmen. — John A. Keel

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together. — Edgar Winter

Do you know what a magical kingdom is in your ear? A fairy cave leads to an Ali Baba doorway, beyond which the bony little ossicles - Malleus, Incus, and Stapes - guard the great snail, Cochlea, to whom God has given the power to transform the indiscernible movement of air into music. — Kristin Chenoweth

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

I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small. — Joan Baez

My direction has never really changed, because I don't think that you can really work gimmicks in gospel music. With gospel music, there is this central theme that always comes around about the love of God, the love of Jesus and the power that you have through Jesus Christ. You don't need a gimmick when you have that. — Yolanda Adams

Do you think music has the power to change people? Like you listen to a piece and go through some major change inside?"
Oshima nodded."Sure, that can happen. We have an experience - like a chemical reaction - that transforms something inside us. When we examine ourselves later on, we discover that all the standards we've lived by have shot up another notch and the world's opened up in unexpected ways. Yes, I've had that experience. Not often, but it has happened. It's like falling in love. — Haruki Murakami

We're all affected by music. It has the power to inspire, uplift us, change our moods, and even alter consciousness. — Andrew Weil

I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves. — Ani DiFranco

Music is a supernatural force on the earth. It has the power to transform the heart and mind. — Kathy McClary

Music has infinite power to reach the gap between the heart and the soul to create infinite and ineffable joy. — Debasish Mridha

Jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together ... Jazz is the personification of transforming overwhelmingly negative circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope, and dignity. — Quincy Jones

Music is a spiritual doorway its power comes from the fact that it plugs directly into the soul, unlike a lot of visual art or textual information that has to go through the more filtering processes of the brain. — Peter Gabriel

Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they like, they are usually fans for Life. If they like the musician and his Music, they will open up their hearts to whatever that musician has to say. It matters not what country the musician or the fan comes from. Music is a language that all understand. It goes beyond and breaks down barriers. This makes the musician very powerful, and with power comes responsibility. — Victor L. Wooten

A form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys - if not the greatest one - of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must be intellectually productive, and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy. — Siegbert Tarrasch

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. — Hunter S. Thompson

No one has been a greater advocate for the power of love in this world than I; both in my life and in my music. — Stevie Wonder

What softened your heart?" I asked softly.
"Good music and a friend."
I felt my eyes burn a little and turned from him, blinking quickly to lap up the sting of tears. "Music has incredible power"
"So does friendship," he supplied frankly. — Amy Harmon

Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools. — Will Shetterly

Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song. — Paul Epworth

Evidently neither cats nor dogs, nor other animals that listen to human music, were constituted for the appreciation of it, for it is not of the slightest use to them in the struggle for existence. Moreover, they and their organs of hearing were much older than man and his music. Their power of appreciating music is therefore an uncontemplated side-faculty of a hearing apparatus which has become on other grounds what we find it to be. So it is, I believe, with man. He has not acquired his musical hearing as such, but has received a highly developed organ of hearing by a process of selection, because it was necessary to him in the selective process ; and this organ of hearing happens also to be adapted to listening to music. — August Weismann

There has always been a strong relationship between music and religion. It is because they both plug directly into the heart and can have real power for good or evil. — Peter Gabriel

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly - that business about marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain. — Anthony Burgess

I believe in music because it has the power of change. — Abigail Washburn

Underneath the picture of a really old guy, Lisa read, "Chess, like music and love, has the power to make men happy. — Jesse Kraai

Pianists of extraordinary talent, such as Christina Petrowska,spend a large part of their early lives perfecting technique ... Miss Petrowska,a Canadian with a phenomenal ability to play the most difficult music cleanly, gave a demonstration of her achievements at Carnegie Recital Hall. A product of the Juilliard School who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti in Europe, Miss Petrowska built most of her program around fiercely difficult contemporary works. She has fingers that work like chrome-plated pistons, and her high-seated position let her bring pulverizing power to bear. — Donal Henahan

One of the earliest memories I have of feeling the power of film music was watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. That was a really clear epiphany for me, when I realized that each film has its own music, and that there was someone out there who wrote this very specific music for just this one film. — Geoff Zanelli

I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power. — Henry Rollins

I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world. — Serj Tankian

Emotions of any kind are produced by melody and rhythm; therefore by music a man becomes accustomed to feeling the right emotions; music has thus the power to form character, and the various kinds of music based on various modes may be distinguished by their effects on character. — Aristotle.

The idea of celebrity has always been very strange to me because it's taking the focus away from the music and attaching it to a person. When we put someone on a pedestal or idolize them, we're giving our own power away. — Marketa Irglova

Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums, the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all. — Rob Sheffield

Well, Jeff Buckley for me is one of the greatest singers I've ever heard. And the reason why is he has an amazing range, amazing emotional power in his voice. And the music he put around it also just had this passion and this soul to it and this spirit to it that very few artists have, and he passed at a very young age. — John Legend

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. — Mark Twain

And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send some of the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago was fatal. and the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would of dismissed as impossible and your grandparents nothing short of magical. — Nicolas Flamel

I've always tried to find God in lots of different things, whether that's been drugs, women, etc, etc ... But all those things are tangible and they exist and you can see them and you can feel them. Music doesn't exist, physically. Yet is commands ever facet of my personality and it has the power to command people how to feel on a physical level, uncontrollably. And I find that so fascinating. — Matthew Healy

Jonny Lang has the power to move the music into the next millennium by reaching the ears of a new generation. The great musicians have the power to break all of the 'isms'-race, age, sex, et cetera. Jonny Lang is one of those musicians. — Luther Allison

Music has the power to make me feel good like nothing else does. It gives me some peace for a while. Takes me back to who I really am. — Gil Scott-Heron

I think the gift of music is it's intuitive capability. I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it's a back-and-forth process. Because it's intuitive, the truth has to be defined intuitively. It can't be preached, it can't be pushed. It's got to normally go across organically and make someone feel something, and that's the power of music. — Serj Tankian

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement — Oliver Sacks

Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It's so much going on in music right now and somebody has to make a difference. — Kanye West

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks

Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it. — Aristotle.

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 is key. It has the power to transport you. I go from being a slightly insecure, shy kind of a person offstage, to this super-confident, motivated, entity onstage. — Neil Diamond