Motivational Quotes

Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

G. K. Chesterton

14.

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

Martin Luther

15.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

16.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

18.

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

Aldous Huxley

19.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

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

21.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

22.

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

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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.

26.

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

Brown, James

27.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

28.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

29.

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

Green, Benny

30.

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

Dietz, Howard

31.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

32.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

33.

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

34.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Sousa, John Philip

38.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

39.

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

Rattle, Simon

40.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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.

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

Newman, Ernest

43.

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

Cocteau, Jean

44.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

45.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

46.

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

Wilson, Colin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

50.

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

Tate, Jeffrey