Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

Wilson, Colin

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

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

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

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

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

Ruskin, John

10.

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

11.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

12.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

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

Huneker, James G.

14.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

[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

17.

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

Rattle, Simon

18.

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

Plutarch

19.

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

Aldous Huxley

20.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

21.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

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.

23.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

24.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

25.

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

Lynn, Loretta

26.

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

27.

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

George Eliot

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

31.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

35.

Britten, Benjamin

36.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

37.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

42.

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

43.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

45.

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

46.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

47.

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

48.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

49.

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.

50.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max