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

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

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

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

Newman, Ernest

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

Wilson, Colin

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

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

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

10.

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

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

16.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

17.

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

18.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

19.

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

George Eliot

20.

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

21.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

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

George Santayana

23.

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

Rattle, Simon

24.

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

25.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

26.

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

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

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

29.

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

30.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

31.

[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

32.

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

33.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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.

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

36.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

37.

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

G. K. Chesterton

38.

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

39.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

40.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

41.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

42.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

43.

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

Oscar Wilde

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Zappa, Frank

48.

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

Dan Rather

49.

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

Luther, Martin

50.

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?