Motivational Quotes

Music

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

- Cage, John

Best Quotes about Music

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

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

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

11.

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)

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

15.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

16.

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

Szell, George

17.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

18.

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

Zappa, Frank

19.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

20.

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

Plutarch

21.

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

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.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

24.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

25.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

26.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

27.

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

John Erskine

28.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

34.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

35.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

36.

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

37.

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

Davis, Miles

38.

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

Gibbons, Billy

39.

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

Kin Hubbard

40.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

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

42.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

47.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

48.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

49.

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

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas