Joshua Bell Quotes

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.

When you do a lyric for 'April in Paris,' those who have heard it before can hear it in a different way now. It can add perspective to a great piece of music that does not have a lyric and may be inaccessible to lot of ears because people don't deal with complex music very well.

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

If music leaves any impression at all, it does so without regard to stylistic issues.

The level on which Japan seems to have picked up on my music seems to be on a more abstract level.

Sometimes I think to talk too much about music almost cheapens it.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

Music has nothing to do with your technical ability.

Music, of almost any kind, always made sense to me.

I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it's something which is higher than words.

The moment you start to talk about playing music, you destroy music. It cannot be talked about. It can only be played, enjoyed and listened to.

Music is a continual learning process. One finds new insights all the time. For me, it began at a very early age; from the beginning, there was something besides the notes.

Well, I don't know any piece by heart, but Mozart goes something like this... What do you think?

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

I can't play any instrument for the life of me, but I know what I want to hear.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.