Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

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

10.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

11.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

12.

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

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 can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

15.

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

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.

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

George Bernard Shaw

18.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

19.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

20.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

21.

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

J. K. Rowling

22.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

23.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

24.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

25.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

26.

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

Gore, Tipper

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

30.

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

31.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

32.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

33.

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

34.

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

Plutarch

35.

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

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

39.

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