Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is only love looking for words.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Music

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

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

Sousa, John Philip

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

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

12.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

13.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

14.

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

15.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

16.

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

17.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

18.

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

Gore, Tipper

19.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

20.

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

Dietz, Howard

21.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

22.

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

Wilson, Colin

23.

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

Aldous Huxley

24.

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

25.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

30.

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

31.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

32.

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

Zappa, Frank

33.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

34.

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

Ed Gardner

35.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

37.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

38.

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

Lennon, John

39.

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

Attali, Jacques

40.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

41.

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

John Erskine

42.

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

43.

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

Plutarch

44.

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

45.

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

George Eliot

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

48.

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

Franklin, Aretha

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert