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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

Plutarch

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

Lennon, John

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

Ed Gardner

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

Rattle, Simon

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

[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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

10.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

11.

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

12.

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

Wordsworth, William

13.

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

14.

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

15.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

J. K. Rowling

18.

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

Miller, Henry

19.

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.

20.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

21.

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

John Erskine

22.

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

23.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

24.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

25.

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

Brown, James

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

30.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

31.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

32.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

33.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

Wilson, Colin

36.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

37.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

39.

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

40.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

41.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

42.

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

43.

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

Huxley, Aldous

44.

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

Winter, Arthur

45.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

46.

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

47.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

48.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

49.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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