Top 299 Ear Quotes

I began making music at the age of four. According to my mother, once I just sat down at the piano and played back a tune by ear. My parents were watching and said to each other, ‘Maybe we should give him music lessons.’

I had terrible ear problems and asthma and allergies. I spent quite a bit of time in hospital up to the age of eight so was not – am still not – extraordinarily intelligent.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

I’ve always had an ear for melodies, and they veer pop. My lyrics are more country – what I love is the storytelling and the structure, how tight the rhymes can be. But pop melodies have always been intrinsically linked to my writing style.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I am not musically educated yet. I don’t read – I make my own language that works for myself. But I play by ear.

My sisters play ball. My older brother, he’s in my ear. My younger brother, he’s in my ear. Critiquing me on my game. That’s who I mostly pay attention to.

I’m one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.

I did ‘Christmas Carol’ off and on through my teenage years, so I always had that dialect and that sound in my ear, which was so helpful. It became second nature.

At a meet and greet in a nightclub in Texas, a girl who looked about 15 years old gave me a VHS copy of ‘Adventures in Babysitting,’ and she whispered in my ear that it’s really just home movie footage of her dad practicing judo.

The fact that I wasn’t expected to read music at all and was absorbing everything by ear… it had a huge affect on the kind of musician that I became.

My mom played 12-string and sang, and my dad could play pretty much any wind instrument and had a great ear for harmony. Soon enough, my sister and I got into music because we were always around it, and people were always listening to it.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

I actually have a thing about proper nouns. They clang on my ear in a weird way when I hear them dropped into movies.

The one thing I do have is good ears. I don’t mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.

Although I’m deaf in only my left ear, when there is noise all around, I’m unable to distinguish sounds and can’t hear anything.

I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.

My mates will tell me they saw me in the newspaper linked to this club and that club, but to be honest it goes in one ear and out the other.

I’ve always tried to come up with something that would catch your ear.

I get told off by my mum for being a bit rough on the pitch. I’m in the referee’s ear a lot – referees probably hate me – but it’s just part of my game. My mum tells me off for that as well; speaking to refs too much.

Tesla is changing the paradigm. We’re going to turn the world on its ear and create high demand through design.

No one realized that I needed eyeglasses until I was 12 years old. My parents were writers, so I was around the sounds of words and developed a vocabulary with my sense of hearing. I play guitar by ear.

I have a condition called Menieres disease which is a problem with fluid retention in the inner ear. It has four symptoms: ringing in the ear, pressure in the ear, fluctuating hearing loss, and attacks of vertigo.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year – a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.

The irony is that the more we fight age, the more it shows. Paint on a 50-year-old face brings to mind a Gilbert and Sullivan comic figure. Smooth the cheeks, and suddenly the ear lobes and hands look out of place. Do we run around in October, painting the gold leaves green?

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically – a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

It’s easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

The best way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My mom is still whispering in my ear, ‘Look as good as you can.’ She taught me that being the best you can be in your appearance as well as your intellect was primary.

The main thing about being a producer and not a beatmaker, the difference is the ear.

There are several patients – there are thousands of patients, tens of thousands of patients, that carry either a stimulator in the brain or in the periphery, in the inner ear, to restore neurological functions or to control diseases like Parkinson’s disease.

My father had a varied ear, from Hank Williams to Ravel.

The strange thing is I can’t play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.

I thought I might get a part as a farmer. I knew about the books but I hadn’t read them. A few weeks later, an actor whispered in my ear, ‘It sounds like you’re in line for James Herriot.’ I read every book in about 48 hours.

Now, one can often get away with playing music by ear when it is not being recorded, but writing is another matter; its mistakes are not forgotten because they are still there to confuse us.

Most Australians who’ve got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.

I love music, and I got an ear for it.

Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, ‘Oh, if they’re still around in two years, I’ll see what they’re up to.’

I always used to listen to quite a bit of classical music because my dad liked it, and if you’ve got any ear for music at all you have to enjoy Mozart.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

I was actually tone deaf until I had tumors in my ears – I had very small ear canals – removed. Once they fixed that, I was actually able to sing in a pleasant manner.

I do like making things a bit controversial – I think that’s what sells and what catches people’s ear.

The sensitive ear of the musician detects a certain musical note in every city which is different from that of another city. He hears in each little brook a new melody, and to him the sound of wind in the treetops of different forests give a varying sound.

I like to put something on and want to listen to it again once I get done listening to it, not feel like I need an ear break.

I love horns, and the bigger the band, the better it sounds to my ear.

I’m passionate about anything I align myself with. You want to talk about chocolate chip cookies? I’m not going to open a chocolate chip cookie store, but I will talk your ear off about it.

Children don’t need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.

My father-in-law has ear hair like a wolverine. It fans out from the auricles, wafting from the ridge lines like cilia, like gray feathered plumage.

I have been using delay and reverberation since the middle 1960s. I use them to make what is almost inaudible to the ear, audible. I do not use them to play loudly but to make the higher harmonics heard.

You see on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and ‘X Factor,’ they all wear ear plugs. But I could not hear myself when I wore them. So that is where the strong voice came from.

A guy playing pool in a pub once said to me that they should put me on the telly. It went in one ear and out the other. But then I started thinking about it. I wondered how it all worked, did you have to be best mates with someone at the BBC who you went to uni with in Oxford?