Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

[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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

10.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

11.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

13.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

Billings, Josh

22.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

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

25.

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

Dietz, Howard

26.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

27.

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

Auden, W. H.

28.

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

Zappa, Frank

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

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

31.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Luther, Martin

34.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

35.

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

36.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

37.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

38.

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

Attali, Jacques

39.

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

40.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

41.

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

Brown, James

42.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

43.

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