Motivational Quotes

Music

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

- Addison, Joseph

Best Quotes about Music

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

10.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

11.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

12.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

13.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

15.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

16.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

17.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

18.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

19.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

20.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

22.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

23.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

24.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

25.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

26.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

27.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

28.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

29.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

31.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

34.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

35.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

36.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

37.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

38.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

39.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

40.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

42.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

43.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

44.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

45.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

46.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

47.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

48.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

49.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

50.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George