Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

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

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

10.

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

11.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

Camus, Albert

13.

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

Attali, Jacques

14.

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)

15.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

20.

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

21.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

22.

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

23.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

24.

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

25.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

26.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

27.

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

Plutarch

28.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

29.

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

30.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Huneker, James G.

34.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

39.

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

Addison, Joseph

40.

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

41.

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

42.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

44.

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

45.

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

Szell, George

46.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

47.

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

John Erskine

48.

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

49.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

50.

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