Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

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.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Sports and music are the same thing to me. When done wrong, they are really frustrating; when done right, they can change your day.

To me, music is a river. I have lived my life beside the river. Every day, I get up and look at the river. I watch it and notice when it rises and falls.

Paul Gray - he believed in my art, and I believed in his music. Together, we decided to change the world, and that's what we did.

If you can write a song that makes people have emotions and show their feelings, that's a powerful thing and a beautiful thing.

What a picture of a better world you have given us, Mozart!

There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

Music is Magic. Magic is Life

If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul.

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

You don't have to be inspired by comedians. You have to be inspired by things that are real, whether it's music, comedy...a movie - that should inspire you.

I love what I do because I get to talk to the people who change the game: the influencers, visionaries who make things happen in music and culture. That's inspiring to me.

It's that transformative nature of love and music and yoga that really inspires me.

Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

I see in the melody of Nature, God. It is a wonderful work of art. The spirit of the art is wonderful. And I feel that I am myself because I have never taken music lightly. Music is the manifestation of God, like everything else.

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people.