Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- G. K. Chesterton

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

Hugo, Victor

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Miller, Henry

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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

Lennon, John

10.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

11.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

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

13.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

14.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

J. K. Rowling

21.

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

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

Wilson, Colin

29.

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

Woody Allen

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Martin Luther

34.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

35.

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

36.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

37.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

39.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

40.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

41.

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

Szell, George

42.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

43.

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

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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

45.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

48.

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

49.

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

Aldous Huxley

50.

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

Schnabel, Artur