Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- G. K. Chesterton

Best Quotes about Music

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

Rattle, Simon

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

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

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

Auden, W. H.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

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

Lennon, John

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

10.

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.

11.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Ed Gardner

16.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

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

18.

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

Huxley, Aldous

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Franklin, Aretha

22.

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

23.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

24.

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

Oscar Wilde

25.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

31.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

32.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

33.

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

Brown, James

34.

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

35.

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

Luther, Martin

36.

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

37.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

38.

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

39.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

40.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

41.

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

Pepys, Samuel

42.

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

Hugo, Victor

43.

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

44.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

45.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Gibbons, Billy

49.

[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

50.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.