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

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

[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

10.

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

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

14.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

15.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

16.

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

17.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

18.

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

19.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

20.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

21.

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

22.

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

Newman, Ernest

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

Szell, George

29.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

30.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

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.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Dan Rather

34.

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.

35.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

36.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

37.

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

38.

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

Lennon, John

39.

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

40.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

41.

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

Luther, Martin

42.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

43.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

45.

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

46.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

47.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

48.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

49.

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

50.

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