Motivational Quotes

Music

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)

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Szell, George

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

Plutarch

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

John Erskine

10.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

13.

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

Brown, James

14.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

15.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

19.

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

Brown, James

20.

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

21.

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

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.

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

Addison, Joseph

24.

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

25.

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

George Bernard Shaw

26.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

27.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

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

Schnabel, Artur

29.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

30.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

31.

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

32.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

33.

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

34.

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

Huneker, James G.

35.

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

Hugo, Victor

36.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

39.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

44.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

45.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

46.

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

George Santayana

47.

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

48.

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

Newman, Ernest

49.

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

50.

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