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

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Lennon, John

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

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

10.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

11.

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

Addison, Joseph

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Gore, Tipper

14.

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

Armstrong, Louis

15.

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

G. K. Chesterton

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

19.

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

20.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

21.

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

Martin Luther

22.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

25.

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.

26.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

27.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

31.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

35.

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

Wilson, Colin

36.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

37.

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

Brown, James

38.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

39.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

40.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

41.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Luther, Martin

45.

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

Woody Allen

46.

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

47.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

Billings, Josh

50.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro