Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Ed Gardner

Best Quotes about Music

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

George Eliot

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

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

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

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

10.

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

11.

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

12.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

13.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

14.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

G. K. Chesterton

18.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

20.

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

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

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

Ed Gardner

23.

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

24.

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

Huxley, Aldous

25.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

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

Wordsworth, William

27.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

30.

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

George Bernard Shaw

31.

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

Aldous Huxley

32.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

33.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

34.

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

35.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

36.

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

Szell, George

37.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

38.

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

39.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

40.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

41.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

42.

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

Newman, Ernest

43.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

44.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

45.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

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

47.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

48.

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

Brown, James

49.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

50.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel