Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is only love looking for words.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Music

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

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Lynn, Loretta

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

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

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

10.

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

Brown, James

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

13.

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

Attali, Jacques

14.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

15.

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

16.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

17.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

18.

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

Dietz, Howard

19.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

21.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

22.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

23.

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

24.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

25.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

26.

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

27.

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

Pepys, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

32.

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

33.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

34.

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

35.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

36.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

39.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

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

Szell, George

49.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

50.

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