Motivational Quotes

Music

Song is the heroics of speech.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

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

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Schnabel, Artur

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

Dan Rather

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

10.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

11.

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

Wordsworth, William

12.

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

Oscar Wilde

13.

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

Rattle, Simon

14.

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

Dietz, Howard

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.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

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

18.

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

Huneker, James G.

19.

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

20.

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

Ed Gardner

21.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

22.

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

23.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

24.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

25.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

26.

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

Davis, Miles

27.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

28.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

29.

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

30.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

31.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Addison, Joseph

35.

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

George Eliot

36.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

37.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

38.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

39.

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

40.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

George Bernard Shaw

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

49.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

50.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas