Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Szell, George

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

George Eliot

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

Gibbons, Billy

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Zappa, Frank

10.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Huneker, James G.

14.

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

15.

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

Plato

16.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

17.

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

18.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

19.

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)

20.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

21.

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

22.

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

Lennon, John

23.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

24.

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

25.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

26.

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

Attali, Jacques

27.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

28.

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

29.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

30.

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

Woody Allen

31.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

33.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

39.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

45.

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

John Erskine

46.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.