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

George Santayana

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Mencken, H. L.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

10.

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

George Bernard Shaw

11.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

12.

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

Szell, George

13.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

17.

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

Dan Rather

18.

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

19.

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

Armstrong, Louis

20.

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

21.

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

Rattle, Simon

22.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

23.

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

24.

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

Oscar Wilde

25.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

27.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

28.

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

29.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

30.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

Davis, Miles

33.

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

34.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

35.

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

Huneker, James G.

36.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

37.

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.

38.

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.

39.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

42.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Newman, Ernest

45.

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

Addison, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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