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

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.

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

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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.

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

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

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

Lennon, John

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

10.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

11.

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

Wordsworth, William

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

14.

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

15.

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

Sousa, John Philip

16.

[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

17.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

19.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

20.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

21.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

22.

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)

23.

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

24.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

25.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

26.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

27.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

28.

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

Newman, Ernest

29.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

30.

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

31.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

32.

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

33.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

34.

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

35.

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

George Bernard Shaw

36.

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

37.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

George Eliot

39.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

40.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

41.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

42.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

43.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

44.

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

Szell, George

45.

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

John Erskine

46.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

47.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.