Motivational Quotes

Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

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

Attali, Jacques

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

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

Szell, George

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

14.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

16.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

17.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

20.

[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

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

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

Plato

23.

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

24.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

25.

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

26.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

27.

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

28.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

29.

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

Gibbons, Billy

30.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

31.

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

32.

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

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.

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

35.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

36.

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

Newman, Ernest

37.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

38.

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.

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

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

41.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

42.

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

43.

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

Gore, Tipper

44.

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.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

48.

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

49.

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

Ed Gardner

50.

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