Motivational Quotes

Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

- Cooke, Alistair

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Zappa, Frank

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

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

John Erskine

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

13.

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

14.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

15.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

16.

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

17.

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

Brown, James

18.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

19.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

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

25.

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

G. K. Chesterton

26.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

27.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

28.

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

Huneker, James G.

29.

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

Sousa, John Philip

30.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

31.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

32.

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

Brown, James

33.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

34.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

35.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

36.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

37.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

38.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

39.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

41.

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

Miller, Henry

42.

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

George Eliot

43.

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

44.

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

45.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

47.

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

Franklin, Aretha

48.

[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

49.

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)

50.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance