Motivational Quotes

Music

The high note is not the only thing.

- Domingo, Placido

Best Quotes about Music

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Miller, Henry

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

10.

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

Pepys, Samuel

11.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

12.

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

Martin Luther

13.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

17.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Luther, Martin

21.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

22.

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

Franklin, Aretha

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

Billings, Josh

33.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

34.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

35.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

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.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

38.

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

Zappa, Frank

39.

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

40.

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

Sousa, John Philip

41.

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

Brown, James

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

44.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

45.

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

46.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

47.

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

Lennon, John

48.

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

49.

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

50.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert