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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

George Santayana

13.

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.

14.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

15.

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

16.

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

17.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

18.

[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

19.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

20.

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

Wordsworth, William

21.

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

22.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

23.

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.

24.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

25.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

26.

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.

27.

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

Huneker, James G.

28.

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

G. K. Chesterton

29.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

30.

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

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

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

Newman, Ernest

33.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

34.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Luther, Martin

37.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

38.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

Davis, Miles

42.

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

43.

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

J. K. Rowling

44.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

45.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

46.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

47.

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

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

Plutarch

50.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James