Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beecham, Sir Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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

Davis, Miles

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

William Shakespeare

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

Ed Gardner

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

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

Luther, Martin

10.

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

Huneker, James G.

11.

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

Dietz, Howard

12.

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

13.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Kin Hubbard

15.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

16.

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

Sousa, John Philip

17.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

18.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

19.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

20.

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

Rattle, Simon

21.

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

22.

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

George Eliot

23.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

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

25.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

26.

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

Aldous Huxley

27.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

28.

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.

29.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

30.

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

Brown, James

31.

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

Plato

32.

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

Schnabel, Artur

33.

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

34.

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

Hugo, Victor

35.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

36.

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

G. K. Chesterton

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

43.

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

Newman, Ernest

44.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

49.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

50.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare