Motivational Quotes

Music

The high note is not the only thing.

- Domingo, Placido

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

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

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

Brown, James

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Zappa, Frank

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

10.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Plutarch

14.

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

15.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

17.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

18.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

19.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

20.

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

21.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

22.

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

23.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

24.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

25.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

26.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

27.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

28.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

29.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

30.

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

J. K. Rowling

31.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

John Erskine

36.

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

37.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Lynn, Loretta

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

43.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

44.

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

45.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

46.

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

Brown, James

47.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

48.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

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

50.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James