Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Cervantes, Miguel De

Best Quotes about Music

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

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

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

Gore, Tipper

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

Woody Allen

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Huneker, James G.

16.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

17.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

18.

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

Dan Rather

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

21.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

22.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

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

24.

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

Wilson, Colin

25.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

26.

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

Rattle, Simon

27.

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

28.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

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

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

33.

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

Oscar Wilde

34.

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

Attali, Jacques

35.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

36.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

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.

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

39.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

40.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

41.

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

42.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

John Erskine

46.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

47.

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

Plato

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Ed Gardner