Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Dan Rather

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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

Plato

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

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

Attali, Jacques

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

Brown, James

10.

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

Ruskin, John

11.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

12.

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

13.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

14.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

15.

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

G. K. Chesterton

16.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

17.

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

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

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.

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

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.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

30.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

32.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

Newman, Ernest

41.

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

Gibbons, Billy

42.

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.

43.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

48.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

49.

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

Szell, George

50.

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