Top 75 Bach Quotes

We consciously tend to listen to stuff that is further than what we do. We listen to Bach.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

‘The Great Gatsby,’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls – I had no chance in either – I found my comfort in Jesus.

I find that Bach is appealing to a lot of different audiences. It really hits people at their core in different ways, but it also creates a meditative space. I just feel like I can play it, and it reaches people.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

Bach’s music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

But it wasn’t just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I’m still and quiet inside, I’ll begin. It’s very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.

I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert’s and Beethoven’s chamber music and Sibelius’ symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I listen to everything while I train. From old school reggae, to classical stuff like Bach, to hip-hop, to rock and roll.

In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

For one person, Haydn is most exciting. Or Bach is the most exciting. For another, it’s Carter or Strauss. For me – and for any musician – all of the music is exciting. And if you don’t approach it with excitement, we can’t be musicians.

Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don’t understand why this happens in the movie industry.

I think J. S. Bach’s music stands among humankind’s greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach’s music is not only as good as music gets but also as good as it gets, period – as good as existence, reality, life, and the world.

I love Mozart, and I love Bach, and Brahms, and – but at 13, I didn’t understand any of that that I was playing.

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn’t need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I’ve been very unhappy with the results.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there’s no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can’t listen to music while I write. It’s too absorbing.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn’t considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

I want to be like Johnny Bach or Pete Carril or Tex.

I became interested in AI in high school because I read ‘Goedel, Escher, Bach,’ a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought ‘Wow, this is what I want to be doing.’

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

I used to love Bach.

We are huge Bach fans, and huge Glenn Gould fans.

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it’s Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

I love classical. I have a lot of, like, Bach and Mozart and stuff. Then you flip on over, and I’ve got, like, Kanye West and, you know, just a bunch of – I am very eclectic. I love every sort of music.

I try to write something that has a common ground to everyone. But there’s been nothing new in music since Bach; he put every note in the world on a piece of paper.

If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn’t really work.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I could not concentrate on memorizing Bach fugues, but I had all of ‘Gotterdammerung’ in my fingers.

The first music I got really into was Bach.

I think that Bach has a very nice sound on the lute. But I find that what I want to do with Bach is best revealed on the guitar.

You have to open the music, so to speak, and see what’s behind the notes because the notes are the same whether it is the music of Bach or someone else.

I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.

There’s nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It’s wonderful music. It’s – on a grand scale, there’s a lot to it. There are – I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.

For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it’s difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting – I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Maybe it’s egocentric or whatever, but when I’m playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I’m making it up as I’m going along.

Almost everything The Beatles did was great, and it’s hard to improve on. They were our Bach. The way to get around it may be to keep it as simple as possible.

I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

I always find Bach to be an expression of a love of life. There’s an enthusiasm that’s absolutely contagious.

If somebody says, ‘Well, what are your favorite composers?’ really, what they are saying is, ‘What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?’ Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.

Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He’s the greatest. He’s interesting for many, many reasons.

Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.

Among non-fiction authors I like Richard Bach, Nichiren Daishonin, Burton Watson, Deepak Chopra and MJ Akbar.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.

When you are accompanying someone, you are listening to them the way you listen to a Bach Chorale, where four parts are going on at the same time, all of which are gorgeous melodies, all being played simultaneously.

Bach in general was so good with the violin. He just finds the genius way around his music on the instrument.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.