Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Franklin, Aretha

Best Quotes about Music

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

John Erskine

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Woody Allen

14.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

15.

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

16.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

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

18.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

19.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

20.

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

21.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

22.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

23.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

26.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

30.

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

31.

[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

32.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

33.

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

34.

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

Dietz, Howard

35.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

36.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

37.

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

38.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

41.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

42.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Lennon, John

46.

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

47.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

48.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

49.

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

Pepys, Samuel

50.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat