Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Music

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

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 don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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

Aldous Huxley

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

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

12.

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

13.

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

Rattle, Simon

14.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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)

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

21.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

22.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

23.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

G. K. Chesterton

27.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

28.

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

Huneker, James G.

29.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

30.

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

George Eliot

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

37.

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

38.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

39.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

41.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

42.

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

Brown, James

43.

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

44.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

45.

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

Newman, Ernest

46.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

47.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

48.

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