Musical Notes Quotes

I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. ~ Charles Darwin

Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your life's journey and play on. ~ Suzy Kassem

To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. ~ Machado De Assis

There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. ~ Sun Tzu

In music, musicians must be able to read musical notes and have developed the skill to follow the music from their studies. This skill allows them to read new musical notes and be capable of hearing most or all of the sounds (melodies, harmonies, etc.) in their head without having to play the music piece. By analogy, in Mathematics, we believe a scientist, engineer or mathematician must be able to read and understand mathematical codes (e.g., Maple, Mathematica) in their head without having to execute the problem. ~ Inna K. Shingareva

There is more value in placing a flower in a rifle barrel than making war. As Jimi Hendrix used to say, musical notes have more importance than bullets. ~ Carlos Santana

Come, Spirits she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them. ~ Virginia Woolf

Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes. ~ Pablo Casals

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination
they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted. ~ Sun Tzu

The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe. ~ Brian Greene

The weather turned cool a few weeks later, and that winter was when Mia had her accident. So that actually turned out to be the last time I went camping. But even if it weren't, I still think it would be the best trip of my life. Whenever I remember it, I just picture our tent, a little ship glowing in the night, the sounds of Mia's and my whispers escaping like musical notes, floating out on a moonlit sea. ~ Gayle Forman

Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes. ~ Anne Lamott

Life is like a piano. White keys are happy moments and the black ones are sad moments. Both keys are played together to give us the sweet music called Life. ~ Suzy Kassem

That the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. ~ Lao-Tzu

Music comes to life inside me. It's no longer just a succession of notes. ~ Maude Julien

Wayne claimed to have memorized the names of all of the different possible combinations of Twinborn. Of course, Wayne also claimed to have once stolen a horse that belched in perfect musical notes, so one learned to take what he said with a pinch of copper. ~ Brandon Sanderson

A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.

The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.

In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started. ~ Twyla Tharp

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, 'each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by 'Dreaming-tracks' that 'lay over the land as "ways" of communication', each track having its corresponding Song.... To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one's way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring. ~ Robert Macfarlane

The music in a song isn't just simply the musical notes. It's the space in between them. A song without strategically placed rests, or any rests at all, isn't a song or music. Without the rests, without the timing, it's nothing. It's just noise. It's just TV. ~ Todd Travis

We are musical notes emanating from the quantum string section of a grand symphonic orchestra. ~ Kane Freeman

...Would you like to know the view I have out of my window, since you love snow? So here you are: the broad whiteness of the Moldau, and along that whiteness, little black silhouettes of people cross from one shore to the other, like musical notes. For example, the figure of some boy is dragging behind him a D-sharp: a sledge. Across the river there are snowy roofs in a distant, lightweight sky...


I walked around the cathedral along a slippery path between snowdrifts. The snow was light, dry: grab a handful, throw it up, and it disperses in the air like dust, as if flying back up. The sky darkened. In it appeared a thin golden moon: half of a broken halo. I walked along the edge of the fortress wall. Old Prague lay below in the thickening mist. The snowy roofs clustered together, cumbrous and dim. The houses seemed to have been piled anyhow, in a moment of terrible and fantastic carelessness. In this frozen storm of outlines, in this snowy semi-darkness, the streetlamps and windows were burning with a warm and sweet lustre, like well-licked punch lollipops. In just one place you could also see a little scarlet light, a drop of pomegranate juice. And in the fog of crooked walls and smoky corners I divined an ancient ghetto, mystical ruins, the alley of Alchemists... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She laughed, and the sound was tantalizing. He didn't understand how musical notes could stroke a man's skin and dance along his thighs. He didn't understand how the notes could be an arrow that pierced his heart. She owned him. ~ Christine Feehan

Each day for me is a musical note that I use to compose the symphony of my life. ~ Paulo Coelho

Love is yesterday's tomorrow, minus the frozen musical notes, soggy teabags, and political opposition from your own embryonic offspring. ~ Jarod Kintz

Sometimes it felt like she was still in the middle of a conversation with him, that they'd only paused for a beat; that this was nothing more than the space between musical notes, the timeout on a playing field, the long, slumbering winter before an inevitable spring. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions. ~ Barbara Januszkiewicz

To help someone, or make them feel special; all it needs is to offer the tools which are thrust, and guidance, and show that you believe in the persons potential. The product is musical notes floating everywhere.
Katia M. S. ~ Katia M. S.

I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests. ~ Noah Cicero

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes. ~ Yoko Ono

I had composed songs, I sang, and played the vina. Practising this music I arrived at a stage where I touched the music of the spheres. Then every soul became a musical note, and all life became music. Inspired by it I spoke to the people, and those who were attracted by my words listened to them instead of listening to my songs. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

It is the nature of a nine-year-old mind to believe that each extreme experience signifies a lasting change in the quality of life henceforth. A bad day raises the expectation of a long chain of grim days through dismal decades, and a day of joy inspires an almost giddy certainty that the years thereafter will be marked by endless blessings. In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance sometimes a like comedy sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meeting. Yet I've known adults who live forever in that odd conviction of nine-year-olds. Because I am an optimist and always have been, the expectation of continued joy comes more easily to me than pessimism, which was especially true during that period of my childhood. ~ Dean Koontz

One of the strangest things is the act of creation.
You are faced with a blank slate - a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument.
You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless things that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.
And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.
It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor's tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.
You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.
You have glimpsed the divine. ~ Vera Nazarian

Without even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument. ~ Ellen Goodman

The way you hold the bow, the way that violinists are trained to produce a note, is really different. I'm not an expert in classical music. I don't want to say something that ends up in print and somebody comes running after me with a shovel, but they're taught for each note to stand alone in a very deliberate kind of way, which is really different than how notes are strung together in old-time music to create rhythm. ~ Bruce Molsky

Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors ... And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making ... Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation. ~ Derek Bailey

LINCKLAEN, JOHN. (Agent of the Holland Land Company.) Journals of Travels into Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont (1791-1792). Translated from French by Helen Lincklaen Fairchild. With biographical sketch and notes. New York, Putnams: 1897. ~ Anonymous

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience. ~ Simon McBurney

As the medieval historian Richard Kieckhefer notes, the people of medieval Europe thought of magic as rational for two reasons: first of all, that it could actually work (that its efficacy was shown by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic) and, secondly, that its workings were governed by principles (of theology or of physics) that could be coherently articulated. ~ Michael Shermer

Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on. ~ Thomas Mallon

The most popular TED speakers give presentations that stand out in a sea of ideas. As Daniel Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, "Like it or not, we're all in sales now."4 If you've been invited to give a TED talk, this book is your bible. If you haven't been invited to give a TED talk and have no intention of doing so, this book is still among the most valuable books you'll ever read because it will teach you how to sell yourself and your ideas more persuasively than you've ever imagined. It will teach you how to incorporate the elements that all inspiring presentations share, and it will show you how to reimagine the way you see yourself as a leader and a communicator. Remember, if you can't inspire anyone else with your ideas, it won't matter how great those ideas are. Ideas are only as good as the actions that follow the communication of those ideas. ~ Carmine Gallo

Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear. ~ Nancy Gibbs

A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues. ~ Joan Jett

I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre. ~ Samantha Barks

There is music blasting from Ayoola's room, she's listening to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lorde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms ~ Oyinkan Braithwaite

We have the insight and the tools to identify and bring to fruition the dormant talent that our artists possess. Favored Nations will be branded as the home base for inspired musical talent. ~ Steve Vai

I'm not a fan of musicals at all, but I do think 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' is a very good. I always thought 'Walk the Line' was very good, too. I was in 'Nowhere Boy.' I played Paul McCartney. That was kind of musical - we did songs in that. ~ Thomas Sangster

I do think that it's better for a musical to live its life first because if you see it on the screen, would you like to go to the theater after that? Probably not. You've seen it. And that's the mystery of a musical that hasn't been filmed. You're bloody meant to go there and buy your ticket. ~ Bjorn Ulvaeus

[As a conductor] there has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in. ~ Charles Hazlewood

A cascade of thousands of pomegranate pits fructify her from above and female hands maculate the goddess's body in the musical mists of mind-blowing nightly sex. But they won't fuck her, they will kill her. ~ Laura Gentile

In almost every musical ever written, there's a place that's usually about the third song of the evening - sometimes it's the second, sometimes it's the fourth, but it's quite early - and the leading lady usually sits down on something; sometimes it's a tree stump in Brigadoon, sometimes it's under the pillars of Covent Garden in My Fair Lady, or it's a trash can in Little Shop of Horrors ... but the leading lady sits down on something and sings about what she wants in life. And the audience falls in love with her and then roots for her to get it for the rest of the night. ~ Howard Ashman

The masculine voice was low but clear, capturing the senses, running along the back of her neck like a caress, making her shiver in delight. Artemis very much feared she was gaping. The Duke of Wakefield had a voice to make angels - or devils - weep. It wasn't the type of male voice currently admired - for the high, unnatural voice of the musico was the rage of London at the moment - but his was the sort of voice that would always seduce the ear. Sure and strong, with a vibrating masculinity on the low notes. She could sit and listen to a voice like this for hours. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Daughter, we didn't need your note - or a prince's visit - to tell us you'd done nothing wrong. We know the daughter we raised. We fear for your future, but never for your character. You take our love and our trust wherever you wander.
Father. ~ Gail Carson Levine

Your name is Do Kyungsoo. You have short-term memory loss, antesomething amnesia, so you won't remember what happened last night. But let me help you out.

Last night I put my head on this pillow and my arms around your waist. My name's Kim Jongin. I call you hyung. Yesterday you loved me. Today you'll love me again.

This is where you undressed me.

This is where I undressed you.

And here I pushed you up against the wall and kissed you really hard (approximately, it was kind of dark) and we thought we should have sex.

Here you sat, dangling your legs. I put my palm on your kneecap and you bent forward and kissed me first.

We talked about ballet. You hummed a tune and my fingers did an arabresque here, grand jeté onto the floor, fouetté en tourant and then sissonne on the back of your hand. Pas de valse fast up your arm and you smiled.

I leaned on this and read your green sticky notes while you went around cleaning up invisible messes. It came to me that all the green looks like grass, and grass is boring without daisies. So I hope you like yellow?

And here's Kim Jongin. Say hello to me? ~ Changdictator

Hey, Tretch. Just writing to say I hope
your date went well and to point out
that Mom and Dad did not leave
notes for me while I was out.
Therefore, you are the favorite.
I'm off to sleep off my feelings of
inadequacy. Hopefully.
Yours truly, Chopped Liver ~ Will Walton

law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. - H. L. MENCKEN, NOTES ON DEMOCRACY ~ Radley Balko

The triumph of plainsong, of polyphony, and of truly liturgical organ playing, in the first half century of his life, represented for Duruflé the victory of a transcendent, hieratic worldview over the secular and popular aberrations ushered in by the nineteenth century. Their demise in the 1960s meant more than the loss of a well-regarded musical tradition; it was also an assault on the worldview that gave his life meaning. ~ James E. Frazier

The issue I had with the Lightspeed albums was that usually the main purpose with them was to fulfil really dorky musical goals, like, 'I wonder if I can do that,' and it was all very personal. It was more that once I'd finished the goal of what the song was, I was kind of done. It was like ticking boxes. ~ Dev Hynes

I'd quite like to do a musical. I'd probably have to develop that myself. ~ Aidan Gillen

As we get older ... I don't know a single person who has devoted their life to musical theatre who hasn't had a couple of misses as well as a bunch of hits. The misses, we learn a great deal from them. ~ Maury Yeston

There are notes between notes, you know. ~ Sarah Vaughan

Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.118 As Mueller notes, "No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.' Gradually this was changed to 'I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.' This might be seen as progress."119 ~ Steven Pinker

If you truly loved someone and they couldn't be in your life you won't hurt them. You will pray for them. You will hope that they find their happiness and place in this world. You will want them to have the best life because love isn't about possession, fear or desperation. When you have a grasp on eternity you don't need to feel time is running out. Time is all you have. Love isn't a game of musical chairs--grab a partner and sit down. It is a search for the right fit for your soul and life purpose. In a life that never ends you will either find the one that sees you as much as you see them, 0r who knows? Maybe, if there are such things as soulmates, God will introduce you, but keep you far enough apart, until each of you fulfill something more important for your growth or God's plan. Regardless, when you can face eternity alone you will know what true love is and that letting go is not an insult to your soul. You can smile because the person you loved has your blessings of protection with them and God has your best interest also in mind. You will find that person to complete you because God wants you to, as much as you do. ~ Shannon L. Alder

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth––: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound? ~ Daniel Dennett

A decent, educated man cannot afford the luxury of vanity without being exceedingly exacting with himself and without occasionally despising himself to the point of hatred. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I was in high school, I was a bad singer. I mean, all my early acting was musical theater, and my first ever show was 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' Everyone's familiar with it. I played priest number 3 and sang so out of tune that it's not even funny. ~ Sam Claflin

I want to do a big Broadway musical, at some point. I would love to do that. To do something there would be super-cool. ~ Lara Pulver

No [I'm not a feminist] because I love men, and I think the idea of 'raise women to power, take the men away from the power' is never going to work out because you need balance. With myself, I'm very in touch with my masculine side. And I'm 50 percent feminine and 50 percent masculine, same as I think a lot of us are. And I think that is important to note. And also I think that if men went down and women rose to power, that wouldn't work either. We have to have a fine balance. ~ Shailene Woodley

The Lounge Lizards were relating with a tradition and it was like I was playing within a musical context. The guitar playing stood out as being different in some way. That was a real education for me. ~ Arto Lindsay

There are plenty of actors who've caught the singing bug and vice versa, but with musical performers, you're constantly a persona - which is something I love about acting: you play a character, you leave and you get to be yourself again. ~ Freddie Stroma

I don't write my standup on paper or anything; but I just organically do it on stage, have an idea, chat it up a little bit. I'm keeping notes. I'm trying to keep up with this world and try to bring out a special every year. ~ Jim Jefferies

But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. Meanwhile the talk went on among the guests, who were many and young, some of this sex, some of that; it went on swimmingly, it went on agreeably, freely, amusingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only - here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes - that was it - the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. ...

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easil ~ Virginia Woolf

An example I love: Diwata auditioned for the school play by doing a big number from Once Upon A Mattress. I went home and my boyfriend plunked out the notes for me, and I had to learn and prepare that song just so I could learn and know how that feels. I've never had that kind of detail in a rehearsal process. Jason Moore is absolutely unbelievable. ~ Sarah Steele

For notes related to books I'm writing, I've wondered whether I should organize my notes better, but I do find that the action or scrolling through them and seeing odd juxtapositions of ideas helps to stimulate my own ideas and creativity. I worry that if I kept the notes in a highly-structured way, I might lose some of these benefits. ~ Gretchen Rubin

We want to connect all these musical worlds together. We just improvise; we know straight away if its going to work or not. They're not covers - I hate the word cover. We do a transcription: mix it up, put our own spin on it. I think people will be surprised how powerful our show is. ~ Luka Sulic

Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to [hear it]. ~ Hans Rosling