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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

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

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

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

16.

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

17.

[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

18.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

19.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

20.

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

21.

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

Billings, Josh

22.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

27.

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

28.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

29.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

30.

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

Miller, Henry

31.

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

32.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

33.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

34.

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

35.

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

Attali, Jacques

36.

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

37.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

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

Szell, George

39.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

43.

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

44.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

45.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

46.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

47.

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.

48.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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