Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

Auden, W. H.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

10.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

11.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

12.

[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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Ed Gardner

16.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

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

18.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

19.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

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

23.

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)

24.

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

25.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

28.

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

George Eliot

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

Schnabel, Artur

31.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

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

George Santayana

33.

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

34.

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

Lynn, Loretta

35.

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

Davis, Miles

36.

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

37.

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

John Erskine

38.

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.

39.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

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

Zappa, Frank

43.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

44.

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

45.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

47.

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

Huxley, Aldous

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Luther, Martin