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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Schnabel, Artur

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.

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Gibbons, Billy

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

10.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

11.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

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

13.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

14.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

18.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

Ed Gardner

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

John Erskine

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.

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

26.

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

Gore, Tipper

27.

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

28.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

29.

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

Addison, Joseph

30.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

31.

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

32.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Wilson, Colin

36.

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

37.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

38.

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

Brown, James

39.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

40.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

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

Ruskin, John

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

49.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

50.

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

Newman, Ernest