Motivational Quotes

Music

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

- Franklin, Aretha

Best Quotes about Music

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Woody Allen

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

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

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

Armstrong, Louis

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

10.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

Luther, Martin

12.

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

Miller, Henry

13.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

14.

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

John Erskine

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

17.

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

18.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

19.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

20.

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

21.

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

Billings, Josh

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

25.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

26.

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

27.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

28.

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

29.

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

Martin Luther

30.

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

31.

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

Szell, George

32.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

33.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

34.

[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

35.

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

Dietz, Howard

36.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

37.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

38.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

40.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

41.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Ruskin, John

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Cocteau, Jean

47.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

48.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

49.

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