Motivational Quotes

Music

The high note is not the only thing.

- Domingo, Placido

Best Quotes about Music

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Brown, James

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

Armstrong, Louis

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

Davis, Miles

10.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

11.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

13.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

14.

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

Zappa, Frank

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

Lennon, John

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

25.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

26.

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

27.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

28.

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

29.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

30.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

31.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

32.

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

Wilson, Colin

33.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

34.

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

35.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

36.

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

37.

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)

38.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

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

42.

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

Wordsworth, William

43.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

44.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Billings, Josh

46.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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

49.

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

Attali, Jacques

50.

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