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

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

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

Mencken, H. L.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Brown, James

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

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

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.

10.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

11.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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

17.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

18.

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

Zappa, Frank

19.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

20.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

Szell, George

22.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

24.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

26.

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

27.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

28.

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

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

31.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

32.

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

33.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

34.

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

Huneker, James G.

35.

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

36.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

37.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

38.

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

Franklin, Aretha

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

45.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

50.

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

Oscar Wilde