Motivational Quotes

Music

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

- Haweis, H. R.

Best Quotes about Music

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

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

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

10.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

11.

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

12.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

13.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

16.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

17.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

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

Sousa, John Philip

19.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

20.

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

Davis, Miles

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

28.

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

Brown, James

29.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

30.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

35.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Cocteau, Jean

39.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

41.

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

42.

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

Gore, Tipper

43.

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

Ruskin, John

44.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

45.

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?