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

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

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

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

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

William Shakespeare

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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

John Erskine

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

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

Sousa, John Philip

14.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

15.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

16.

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

Wilson, Colin

17.

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

Brown, James

18.

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

Miller, Henry

19.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

20.

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

Zappa, Frank

21.

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

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

24.

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

25.

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

Armstrong, Louis

26.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

27.

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

28.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

29.

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

30.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

31.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Newman, Ernest

35.

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

Green, Benny

36.

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.

37.

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

Pepys, Samuel

38.

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

Martin Luther

39.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

40.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

41.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

42.

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

43.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

46.

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

47.

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

Johnson, Samuel

48.

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

49.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

50.

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