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

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

Zappa, Frank

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

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

Plato

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

Armstrong, Louis

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Tate, Jeffrey

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Sousa, John Philip

12.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

13.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

14.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

15.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

16.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

J. K. Rowling

20.

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

21.

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

22.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

24.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

25.

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

Attali, Jacques

26.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

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

29.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

30.

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

31.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

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

36.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

George Bernard Shaw

41.

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

42.

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

Woody Allen

43.

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

Brown, James

44.

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

Lennon, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Plutarch

48.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

49.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

50.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich