Motivational Quotes

Music

Good music is very close to primitive language.

- Diderot, Denis

Best Quotes about Music

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Miller, Henry

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

Franklin, Aretha

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.

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

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

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

Billings, Josh

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

10.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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

Brown, James

15.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

16.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

17.

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

Pepys, Samuel

18.

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

19.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

20.

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

21.

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

Sousa, John Philip

22.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

23.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

24.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

25.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

26.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

27.

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

28.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

29.

[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

30.

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

31.

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

Huneker, James G.

32.

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.

33.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

34.

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

Luther, Martin

35.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

36.

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

37.

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

Plato

38.

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

39.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

40.

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

41.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

42.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Rattle, Simon

46.

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

Wordsworth, William

47.

I hate music, especially when it's played.