Motivational Quotes

Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

George Santayana

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Wilson, Colin

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

Schnabel, Artur

10.

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

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

Sousa, John Philip

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

Gore, Tipper

15.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

16.

[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

17.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

18.

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

19.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

20.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

22.

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

23.

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

George Eliot

24.

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

Kin Hubbard

25.

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

Hugo, Victor

26.

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

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

29.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

30.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

31.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

33.

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

Huneker, James G.

34.

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.

35.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

39.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

40.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

41.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

42.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

43.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

44.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

45.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

46.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

47.

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

Dan Rather

48.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

49.

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

50.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold