Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louis Armstrong

When I go to the Gate, I'll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we'll play 'Sleepy Time Down South' and 'Hello, Dolly!.' Then he can blow a couple that he's been playing up there all the time.

Louis Armstrong

My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people.

Louis Armstrong

If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out.

Louis Armstrong

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

Louis Armstrong

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

Louis Armstrong

I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing.

Louis Armstrong

You blows who you is.

Louis Armstrong

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

Louis Armstrong

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

Louis Armstrong

My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.

Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.

Lord Byron

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.

Lord Byron

There is music in all things, if men had ears.

Lord Chesterfield

Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two--a proof of the decline of that country.

Lord Chesterfield

If you love music hear it; go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light; brings him into a great deal of bad company; and takes up a great deal of time, which might be much better employed.

Mahalia Jackson

Gospel music in those days of the early 1930s was really taking wing. It was the kind of music colored people had left behind them down South and they liked it because it was just like a letter from home.

Mahalia Jackson

If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love.

Mahalia Jackson

A great influence in my life was the sanctified or Holiness churches...Everybody in there sang and they clapped and stomped heir feet and sang with their whole body... Their music was so strong and expressive, it used to bring tears to my eyes.

Mahalia Jackson

Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help.

Mahalia Jackson

Without a song, each day would be a century.

Mahatma Gandhi

... there are chords in every human heart. If we only knew how to strike the right chord, we would bring out the music.

Gavin Bryars

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

Gavin Bryars

The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make my concerto "virtuosic" in the sense of a technical show-off. I want a beautiful sound and a melodic and lyrical line. I am more interested in the way someone can play musically.

Madame de Stael

The memories which come to us through music are not accompanied by any regrets; for a moment music gives us back the pleasures it retraces, and we feel them again rather than recollect them.

Madame de Stael

All music, even if its occasion be a gay one, renders us pensive.

Madame de Stael

nothing recalls the past like music ...

Madame de Stael

Music revives the recollections it would appease.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To blow is not to play on the flute; you must move the fingers. [Ger., Blasen ist nicht floten, ihr musst die Finger bewegen.]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Music, in the best sense, does not require novelty; nay, the older it is, and the more we are accustomed to it, the greater its effect.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I call architecture frozen music.

Joe Zawinul

I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.