- Capitalism has us feeling like everything we do in our free time is inherently worthless because it's not tied to productivity.
- I won't look back to regret yesterday, we're not handed tomorrow so I'll live for today.
- Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.
- I make music for ears, not eyes.
- Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
- Don't walk in front of me... I may not follow. Don't walk behind me... I may not lead. Walk beside me... just be my friend.
- The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
- After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
- Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
- Life's greatest tragedy is not that it will someday end, but that most only live to follow directions and sometimes we end up totally lost.
- Music is the soundtrack to every good and bad time we will ever have.
- Music shouldn't be just a tune, it should be a touch.
- The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.
- It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
- I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off.
- Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.
- As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
- Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom... is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
- Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
- Great beauty can be found in harmonious contrast variations, and brief uses of extremes.
- The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
- Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
- If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.
- We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
- Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
- Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.
- When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.
- A man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.
- It's all about money, not freedom. You think you're free? Try going somewhere without money.
- It's just a ride.
- Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.
- Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.
- Play it fuckin' loud!
- None but ourselves can free our minds.
- Music can change the world because it can change people.
- If we can write or sing or create in some way, even when we are dealing with difficulties or pain, then it becomes something bigger than ourselves - and often beautiful.
- It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.
- I've found that no matter what life throws at me, music softens the blow.
- Sharing music is personal because music speaks, it feels, it breathes. And it always says something about you.
- Love with your heart. Use your head for everything else.
- If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
- Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
- Music fathoms the sky.
- Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
- I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
- Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
- If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
- Losing all hope was freedom.
- Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
- Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
- Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
- A good country song takes a page out of someone's life, and puts it into music.
- Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.
- Some people will never like you because your spirit irritates their demons.
- When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
- I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
- Music is stored in our long-term memory. When we learn something through music, we tend to remember it longer and believe it more deeply.
- When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let is destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.
- We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together. But we sure make it feel like we're together, because we're scared of seeing each other with somebody else.
- To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
- The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.
- My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
- Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
- When the music changes, so must your dance. It was the most beautifully worded truth, a profound lesson reminding me to trust my instincts, to let life guide me, and to never stay anywhere doing the same thing longer than I was supposed to.
- A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.
- Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words.
- If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.
- If you understand or if you don't. If you believe or if you doubt. There's a universal justice. And the eyes of truth, are always watching you.
- It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
- The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
- You become what you give your attention to.
- None of it mattered, because there was music.
- You must be prepared to work always without applause.
- Dancing is creating a sculpture that is visible only for a moment.
- Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic. It is not for everybody. It is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
- When you're happy, you enjoy the music but when you're sad, you understand the lyrics.
- Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.
- Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
- Music is an outburst of the soul.
- And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
- He who has the 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'.
- We have art in order not to die of the truth.
- Without music, life would be a mistake.
- You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
- It all depends on what you value. Figure this out on your own, nobody shows you how to.
- Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.
- Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
- Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
- It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
- Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
- There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
- Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise.
- Would you destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful?
- Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.
- Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.
- If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
- Where words leave off, music begins.
- Creativity takes courage.
- The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
- Music is the universal language of mankind.
- I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else.
- I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
- When words fail, music speaks.
- If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
- If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
- Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.
- You can't go by nothing but your own convictions. Because if you don't live the way you believe, sooner or later you will believe the way you live.
- You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.
- Without music, life would be a blank to me.
- Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.
- I was captured by music at a really early age. I was really captured by it. Everything about it. It was my mother... It was my father... It was my play thing. It was my toy. It was the best thing in my life.
- When all of this music sounds like you know what you want to say, then it will have been of all worth, ever. You will be something complete unto yourself, present and unique.
- Music was the only beautiful thing he owned.
- Music defines us, for it shapes our souls and minds.
- This is the strangest life I have ever known.
- For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.
- The world is teeming, anything can happen.
- There is nothing stable in the world, uproar's your only music.
- Faith is why I'm here today and faith is why I made it through.
- I live to inspire, not start the fire.
- You don't know what you got till it's gone.
- All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet - it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.
- Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
- ...my music isn't just music - it's medicine.
- Music gives color to the air of the moment.
- One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
- Ignore all hatred and criticism. Live for what you create, and die protecting it.
- Doing what you love is freedom. Loving what you do is happiness.
- Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
- Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Music... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
- This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
- If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.
- The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
- A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
- Don't tell me I shouldn't just because you couldn't.
- If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
- Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
- Comfort is the worst addiction.
- The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
- The pianokeys are black and white, but they sound like a million colors in your mind.
- Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.
- Music is the strongest form of magic.
- If you're going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.
- If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
- Music is the soul of language.
- Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
- Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
- If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
- People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.
- It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
- Laughter with those that understand us is music for the soul. A hug at the right moment and a kind shoulder to lean on, is the sprinkle of magic that keeps us walking towards hope.
- That is often why you come to music, isn't it? To feel that you are not alone?
- Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began.
- Don't waste your time or time will waste you.
- Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.
- If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.
- Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.
- It's a beautiful life, if you can find it.
- It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once.
- The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.
- Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
- Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.
- Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
- Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
- Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
- Everything you can imagine is real.
- Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
- Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.
- She didn't know any better. Nobody had ever told her she couldn't. Because of this, she moved through the city like some faerie creature. She walked roads no one else could see, and it made her music wild and strange and free.
- Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us.
- Music is forever. Music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.
- We are not here to do what has already been done.
- You can live with me in this house I've built out of writers blocks.
- The point of writing music and experiencing music isn't to make people comfortable necessarily.
- No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself.
- Hard to say what's right when all I wanna do is wrong.
- A song and a smile from someone I cared about could be enough to distract me from all that darkness, if only for a little while.
- You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
- Learn to recognize when something is good, even when it's not what you intended it to be.
- The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and mundane to get to what might otherwise be invisible.
- There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.
- When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.
- When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
- Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee. And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
- When you play, never mind who listens to you.
- If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.
- When you rush, all you are doing is practicing your mistakes at a faster pace.
- Am I the reason you breathe? Or am I the reason you cry?
- Because some things sometimes aren't ours to hold, but just beautiful to listen to.
- Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.
- Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
- He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books.
- All cruelty springs from weakness.
- Music is feelings in search of words.
- Music is the beat of a drum that keeps time with our emotions.
- If a musician wants to become a fine artist, he must first become a finer person.
- Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
- If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.
- Although wisdom is built on experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.
- Remember, that times and situations change, but your heart doesn't have to necessarily.
- The silence gets us nowhere, nowhere way to fast.
- Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
- Songwriting is a bitch. And then it has puppies.
- If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
- Music heard so deeply. That it is not heard at all, but you are the music. While the music lasts.
- Art doesn't owe anything to anyone.
- Perhaps his goal had not been to understand, but to let go.
- Lose your dream, you lose your mind.
- It's harder to make the glass than break the glass.
- Music is well said to be the speech of angels in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
- Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
- ...as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain.
- The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest - to increase one's knowledge of self and world.
- The universe is an intelligence test.
- Think for yourself. Question authority.
- The more you love music, the more music you love.
- Excuse me if I have some place in my mind where I go time to time.
- I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
- People tend to choke that which they do not understand.
- Reality is wrong. Dreams are for the real.
- Bees don't waste their time explaining to flies why honey is better than shit.
- Saying no to someone is saying yes to yourself.
- Sometimes you have to forget what you feel and remember what you deserve.
- Whoever brings you the most peace should get the most time.
- You either quit or keep going. They both hurt.
- Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
- What is to give light must endure burning.
- The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
- It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
- You have to lose yourself to find yourself.
- The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.