Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

Hugo, Victor

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Green, Benny

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

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

Martin Luther

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

Dietz, Howard

10.

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

Gore, Tipper

11.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

12.

[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

13.

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

Aldous Huxley

14.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

15.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Woody Allen

19.

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

Wordsworth, William

20.

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

21.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

Lennon, John

23.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

24.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

25.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

26.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

27.

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

George Bernard Shaw

28.

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

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.

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

31.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

32.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

33.

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

Attali, Jacques

34.

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

35.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

36.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

40.

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

41.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

42.

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

43.

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

Kin Hubbard

44.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

45.

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

Ed Gardner

46.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

48.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

49.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

50.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David