L quotes

View Quote But music moves us, and we know not why;We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.Is it the language of some other state,Born of its memory ? For what can wakeThe soul's strong instinct of another world,Like music?

View Quote Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Erinna, The Golden Violet (1827)

View Quote We would liken music to Aladdin’s lamp — worthless in itself, not so for the spirits which obey its call. We love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings, it can summon with a touch.

View Quote Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1831) Vol I, Chapter 8, page 64

View Quote He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, “you are irrelevant”; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, “Listen.” For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.

View Quote Ursula K. Le Guin, An die Musik (first published in The Western Humanities Review (1961) Vol. 15, No. 3)

View Quote Hey Jude, don't make it bad Take a sad song and make it better Remember to let her into your heart Then you can start to make it better

View Quote Lennon–McCartney, Hey Jude (1968)

View Quote Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi.

View Quote Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

View Quote Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. From a letter to Christian Goldbach, April 17, 1712. Quot. after: Schäfke, R. Geschichte der Musikästhetik in Umrissen. Mit einem Vorwort von Werner Korte. 2 Aufl. Tutzing, Schneider, 1964, S. 289

View Quote The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. ...it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections.

View Quote Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

View Quote So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.

View Quote Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

View Quote Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity.

View Quote Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2006)