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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

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

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

Ruskin, John

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Sousa, John Philip

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.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

Attali, Jacques

16.

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

17.

[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

18.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

19.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

20.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

21.

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

Cocteau, Jean

22.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

23.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

24.

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

25.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

26.

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

Huneker, James G.

27.

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

Ed Gardner

28.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

35.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

36.

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

Huxley, Aldous

37.

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.

38.

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

Dietz, Howard

39.

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

Oscar Wilde

40.

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

George Santayana

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.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

43.

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

44.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

45.

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

Plato

46.

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

Aldous Huxley

47.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.