Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beerbohm, Sir Max

Best Quotes about Music

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

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

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

Plato

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

10.

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

Szell, George

11.

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

Gibbons, Billy

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

16.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

18.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

19.

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

Green, Benny

20.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

21.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

22.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

23.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

24.

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

25.

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

Ed Gardner

26.

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

27.

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)

28.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

31.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

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

Dietz, Howard

33.

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

34.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

George Eliot

38.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

39.

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

Newman, Ernest

40.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

41.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

42.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

43.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

44.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

G. K. Chesterton

47.

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

48.

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

Wilson, Colin

49.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

50.

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

Mencken, H. L.