Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

10.

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

11.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

12.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

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

Gore, Tipper

15.

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

Brown, James

16.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

17.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

24.

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

Green, Benny

25.

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

Gibbons, Billy

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

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

Dan Rather

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

34.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

35.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

Plutarch

47.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

48.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

49.

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

50.

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