Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Billings, Josh

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

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

Huneker, James G.

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

Plato

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

10.

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

Ed Gardner

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

14.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

16.

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

17.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

18.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

George Bernard Shaw

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

24.

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

Addison, Joseph

25.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

26.

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

27.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

28.

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

29.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

30.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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)

35.

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

Zappa, Frank

36.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

37.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Dietz, Howard

41.

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

42.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

43.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

44.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

45.

[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

46.

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

Dan Rather

47.

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