Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beecham, Sir Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

Green, Benny

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

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

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

Plutarch

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

Brown, James

10.

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

Plato

11.

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

12.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

13.

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

George Eliot

14.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

15.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

16.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

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

Kin Hubbard

20.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

21.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

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

Wilson, Colin

23.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

24.

[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

25.

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

Cocteau, Jean

26.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

27.

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

Attali, Jacques

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Davis, Miles

31.

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

32.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

33.

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

Lennon, John

34.

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

35.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

36.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

39.

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

40.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

41.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

42.

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

43.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

44.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

45.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

46.

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

47.

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

Zappa, Frank

48.

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

Lynn, Loretta

49.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

50.

You are the music while the music lasts.