Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Wilson, Colin

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Attali, Jacques

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

13.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

14.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Huxley, Aldous

15.

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

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.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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.

19.

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

Lynn, Loretta

20.

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

21.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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.

28.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

29.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

30.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

33.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Plato

39.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

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

41.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

42.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

43.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

44.

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

Woody Allen

45.

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

46.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

47.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

48.

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

Franklin, Aretha

49.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.