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

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

10.

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

Brown, James

11.

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

12.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

13.

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

Schnabel, Artur

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

18.

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

Zappa, Frank

19.

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

20.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

21.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

22.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

23.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

24.

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

Dan Rather

25.

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)

26.

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

27.

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

Kin Hubbard

28.

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

Miller, Henry

29.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

Gore, Tipper

32.

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

Huxley, Aldous

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

36.

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.

37.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

Dietz, Howard

39.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

40.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

41.

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

Gibbons, Billy

42.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

46.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

47.

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

48.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

49.

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

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon