Life is like a piano… What you get out of it depends on how you play it. ~Author Unknown

The piano is the social instrument par excellence… drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. ~Jacques Barzun

PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. ~Ambrose Bierce

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Pianos at the Sauder Village and Museum, Archibold, Ohio

A piano store looks like a funeral parlor for music. ~ Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. ~Ani Difrenceo

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in and the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge. ~William Gaddis

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. ~Bob Hope

The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air. ~Kenneth Miller

Get up from that piano. You’re hurtin’ its feelings. ~ Jelly Roll Morton

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing ‘Abide with Me’ in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates. Malcolm Muggeridge

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides! ~Artur Schnabel

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. ~Andre Segovia

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. ~Oscar Wilde

They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice- ‘Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. ~Oscar Wilde

Photo credit: David M. Guion