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

Winter, Arthur

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

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

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)

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

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

Brown, James

11.

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

Billings, Josh

12.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

13.

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

George Santayana

14.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

15.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

16.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

17.

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

18.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

19.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

20.

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

Woody Allen

21.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

22.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

23.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

24.

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

Brown, James

25.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

26.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

27.

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

28.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

29.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

30.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

31.

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

32.

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

Rattle, Simon

33.

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

34.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

35.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Armstrong, Louis

41.

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

42.

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

Luther, Martin

43.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

44.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

Lennon, John

47.

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

48.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

49.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

50.

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