Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

Dan Rather

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

Schnabel, Artur

[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

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Rattle, Simon

10.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

11.

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

12.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

17.

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

18.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

19.

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

Attali, Jacques

20.

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

Newman, Ernest

21.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

22.

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

Kin Hubbard

23.

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

G. K. Chesterton

24.

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

Zappa, Frank

25.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Huneker, James G.

29.

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

Lynn, Loretta

30.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

31.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

32.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

33.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

34.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

38.

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

39.

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

Gibbons, Billy

40.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

41.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

45.

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

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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

47.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

48.

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

49.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

50.

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

Huxley, Aldous