Motivational Quotes

Music

The high note is not the only thing.

- Domingo, Placido

Best Quotes about Music

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Sousa, John Philip

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

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

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

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

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

Plutarch

10.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

11.

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

Wilson, Colin

12.

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

13.

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

Dietz, Howard

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

G. K. Chesterton

17.

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

18.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

19.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

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.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

22.

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

Miller, Henry

23.

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

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

27.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

29.

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

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

34.

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

35.

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

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.

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

38.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

39.

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

40.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

41.

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

42.

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

J. K. Rowling

43.

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

44.

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

John Erskine

45.

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

Woody Allen

46.

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

Davis, Miles

47.

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

Newman, Ernest

48.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

49.

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

Luther, Martin

50.

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