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

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

Zappa, Frank

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

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

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 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

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

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

11.

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

Martin Luther

12.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

George Santayana

14.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

15.

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

J. K. Rowling

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

George Eliot

18.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

19.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

20.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

21.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

22.

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

Plato

23.

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.

24.

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

Dietz, Howard

25.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

26.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Brown, James

32.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

33.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

34.

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

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

37.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

38.

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

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

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

41.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

42.

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

43.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

46.

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

Wilson, Colin

47.

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.

48.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

49.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

50.

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