Motivational Quotes

Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Wordsworth, William

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

12.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Attali, Jacques

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.

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

Gore, Tipper

18.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

19.

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

Szell, George

20.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

21.

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

22.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

23.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

24.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

25.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

26.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

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

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

Dan Rather

33.

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

34.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

35.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

36.

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

Huneker, James G.

37.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

38.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

45.

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

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

48.

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

Aldous Huxley

49.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.