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

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

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

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

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

10.

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

11.

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

George Bernard Shaw

12.

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

Cocteau, Jean

13.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

14.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

15.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

16.

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.

17.

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.

18.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

19.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

20.

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

Dan Rather

21.

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.

22.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Ed Gardner

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

29.

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

30.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

31.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

33.

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

34.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

36.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

37.

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

Brown, James

38.

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

39.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

41.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

42.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

43.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

46.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

47.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

48.

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

Franklin, Aretha

49.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

50.

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