Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Green, Benny

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Plutarch

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

Gibbons, Billy

10.

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

George Eliot

11.

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.

12.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

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

Brown, James

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

Brown, James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

26.

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

Gore, Tipper

27.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

28.

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

29.

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

30.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

31.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

32.

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

33.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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)

37.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

39.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

40.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

42.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

43.

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

44.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

45.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Wordsworth, William

49.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

50.

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