Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Brown, James

Best Quotes about Music

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Gibbons, Billy

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

Ed Gardner

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.

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

10.

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

11.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

12.

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

Miller, Henry

13.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

14.

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

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

17.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

18.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

21.

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

Plutarch

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Luther, Martin

28.

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

Wilson, Colin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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)

32.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Rattle, Simon

40.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.