Motivational Quotes

Music

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Music

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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

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

Miller, Henry

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

10.

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

11.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

12.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

14.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

15.

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

16.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

17.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

19.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

20.

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

Cocteau, Jean

21.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

22.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

23.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

24.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

25.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

27.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

28.

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

Attali, Jacques

29.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

30.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

31.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

33.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

34.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

35.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

36.

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

37.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

38.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

39.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

40.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

41.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

42.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

43.

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

44.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

45.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

46.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

47.

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

48.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

49.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

50.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe