Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

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

Luther, Martin

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

Brown, James

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

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

George Bernard Shaw

10.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

11.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

12.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

13.

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)

14.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

15.

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

Dan Rather

16.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

17.

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

18.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

19.

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

20.

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

Winter, Arthur

21.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

22.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

23.

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

Huxley, Aldous

24.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

25.

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

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

28.

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

29.

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

Szell, George

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

33.

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.

34.

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

Zappa, Frank

35.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

37.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Franklin, Aretha

43.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

44.

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