Motivational Quotes

Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Szell, George

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

[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

10.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

11.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

14.

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

Huneker, James G.

15.

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

16.

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

Hugo, Victor

17.

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

18.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

20.

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

21.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

22.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

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

Huxley, Aldous

25.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

26.

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

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

30.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

32.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

33.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

36.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

39.

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

Davis, Miles

40.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

41.

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

42.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

43.

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

Billings, Josh

44.

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

45.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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.

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

George Bernard Shaw

48.

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

Dietz, Howard

49.

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

50.

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