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

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

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

10.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

13.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

14.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

16.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

17.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

18.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

19.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

20.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

21.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

22.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

23.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

28.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

29.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

30.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

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.

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

33.

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

Martin Luther

34.

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

35.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

36.

[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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

41.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

45.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

46.

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

47.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.