Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Franklin, Aretha

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Kin Hubbard

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

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

Winter, Arthur

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

Mencken, H. L.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

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

George Bernard Shaw

11.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

14.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

15.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Schnabel, Artur

17.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

18.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

19.

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

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

22.

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

Luther, Martin

23.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

24.

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

Gore, Tipper

25.

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

26.

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

George Santayana

27.

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

28.

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

Szell, George

29.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

30.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

31.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

32.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

34.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

35.

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

Wordsworth, William

36.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

37.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

38.

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

39.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

40.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

41.

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

42.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

43.

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

44.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

45.

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

Martin Luther

46.

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

Huneker, James G.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

50.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James