Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Green, Benny

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

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

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

13.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

15.

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

Rattle, Simon

16.

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

17.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

18.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

19.

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.

20.

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

Szell, George

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

27.

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

Ed Gardner

28.

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

Winter, Arthur

29.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

30.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

31.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

33.

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

34.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

35.

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

George Santayana

36.

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

37.

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

George Bernard Shaw

38.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

Plato

40.

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

Brown, James

41.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

42.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

43.

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)

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

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

Franklin, Aretha

50.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William