Motivational Quotes

Music

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

- Duffecy, James

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

10.

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

Cocteau, Jean

11.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

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

13.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

16.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

17.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

18.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

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

20.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

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

Wordsworth, William

22.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

23.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

24.

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

25.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

26.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

27.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

28.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

29.

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

Ed Gardner

30.

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

Dietz, Howard

31.

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

Miller, Henry

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

34.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

35.

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.

36.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

37.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

38.

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

Attali, Jacques

39.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

40.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

41.

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

42.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

50.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard