Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is only love looking for words.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Music

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

Huxley, Aldous

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

G. K. Chesterton

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

Szell, George

10.

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

Luther, Martin

11.

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

12.

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

13.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

14.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

15.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

19.

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

20.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

21.

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

Dan Rather

22.

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

Kin Hubbard

23.

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

Green, Benny

24.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

25.

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

26.

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

Attali, Jacques

27.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

28.

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

Brown, James

29.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

30.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

31.

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.

32.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

33.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

38.

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

39.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

40.

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

41.

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

Martin Luther

42.

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

43.

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

44.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

Franklin, Aretha

47.

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

George Bernard Shaw

48.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

49.

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

Wordsworth, William

50.

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