Motivational Quotes

Music

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Music

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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.

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Rattle, Simon

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

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

Woody Allen

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Miller, Henry

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

Addison, Joseph

10.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

11.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Wilson, Colin

16.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

18.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

19.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

20.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

21.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Kin Hubbard

25.

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

Dan Rather

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Franklin, Aretha

29.

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

30.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

31.

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

George Santayana

32.

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)

33.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

37.

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

38.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.