Motivational Quotes

Music

[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

Best Quotes about Music

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

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

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

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

John Erskine

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

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Szell, George

12.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

13.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

14.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

18.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

19.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

23.

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

Dietz, Howard

24.

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

25.

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

Martin Luther

26.

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

27.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

28.

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

29.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

32.

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

George Bernard Shaw

33.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

34.

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

Luther, Martin

35.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

36.

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

37.

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

Franklin, Aretha

38.

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

39.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

40.

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

41.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

42.

[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

43.

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

Sousa, John Philip

44.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

45.

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

Dan Rather

46.

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

47.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

48.

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

49.

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

Hugo, Victor

50.

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