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

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

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

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

George Santayana

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

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

William Shakespeare

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

Brown, James

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

Franklin, Aretha

10.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

11.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

12.

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

Gibbons, Billy

13.

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

14.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

15.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

16.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

17.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

18.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

19.

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

Szell, George

20.

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

Schnabel, Artur

21.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

22.

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

23.

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

24.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

25.

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

26.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

29.

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

Wilson, Colin

30.

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

Winter, Arthur

31.

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

32.

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

Pepys, Samuel

33.

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

34.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

35.

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

36.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

37.

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

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

40.

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

41.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

42.

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

George Bernard Shaw

43.

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)

44.

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

45.

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

Luther, Martin

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

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