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

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 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

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

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

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

Plato

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

13.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

14.

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

Martin Luther

15.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Franklin, Aretha

21.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

22.

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

23.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

24.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

25.

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

Lennon, John

26.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

27.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

28.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

29.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

30.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

40.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

41.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

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

46.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

47.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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