Motivational Quotes

Music

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

- Dan Rather

Best Quotes about Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

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

Szell, George

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

Luther, Martin

10.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

12.

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

13.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

14.

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

15.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

16.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

17.

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

G. K. Chesterton

18.

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

19.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

20.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

21.

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

22.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

23.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

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

Huxley, Aldous

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

28.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

29.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

30.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

31.

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

32.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

34.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

35.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

36.

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

Oscar Wilde

37.

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

Wilson, Colin

38.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

39.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

40.

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

41.

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

42.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Plato

44.

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