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

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Miller, Henry

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

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

10.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

11.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

12.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

13.

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

Zappa, Frank

14.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

20.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

23.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

24.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

25.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

26.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

27.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

28.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

Wordsworth, William

31.

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

Huxley, Aldous

32.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

33.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

36.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

37.

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

38.

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)

39.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

40.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

41.

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

Davis, Miles

42.

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

43.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

44.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

45.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

46.

Music causes us to think eloquently.