Motivational Quotes

Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

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

Ed Gardner

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

13.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

14.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

16.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

17.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

19.

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)

20.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

22.

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

Franklin, Aretha

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

25.

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

26.

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

Pepys, Samuel

27.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

28.

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

29.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

30.

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

31.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

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.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

Ruskin, John

38.

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

39.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

40.

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

Gore, Tipper

41.

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

Lennon, John

42.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

43.

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

44.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

47.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

48.

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

49.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

50.

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

Billings, Josh