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

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

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

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

10.

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

11.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

12.

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

13.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

14.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

15.

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

Brown, James

16.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

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

18.

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

George Eliot

19.

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

Dietz, Howard

20.

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

Oscar Wilde

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

27.

[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

28.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

36.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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)

39.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

40.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

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

George Santayana

43.

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

Kin Hubbard

44.

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

45.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

46.

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

47.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

48.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.