Motivational Quotes

Music

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

- Giles, Henry

Best Quotes about Music

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

Newman, Ernest

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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 resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

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)

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.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

13.

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

14.

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

Zappa, Frank

15.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

16.

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

17.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

18.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

19.

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

20.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

21.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

22.

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

23.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

24.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

25.

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

Dan Rather

26.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

27.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

33.

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

Winter, Arthur

34.

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

35.

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

Dietz, Howard

36.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.