Motivational Quotes

Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

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

Gore, Tipper

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

Brown, James

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

10.

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

Luther, Martin

11.

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)

12.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

13.

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

14.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

15.

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

16.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

17.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

18.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

Davis, Miles

20.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

21.

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

Franklin, Aretha

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

24.

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

25.

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

Billings, Josh

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Wordsworth, William

29.

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

30.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

33.

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

Attali, Jacques

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

36.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

J. K. Rowling

38.

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

39.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

40.

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

41.

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

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

43.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Dan Rather

48.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

50.

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