Motivational Quotes

Music

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

- Herschel, Sir John

Best Quotes about Music

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

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

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

Plutarch

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

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Green, Benny

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

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

Miller, Henry

10.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

11.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

12.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

13.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

14.

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

15.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

16.

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

17.

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

18.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

19.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

20.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

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

22.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

23.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

26.

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

27.

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

Dan Rather

28.

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

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

31.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

John Erskine

33.

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

34.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

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

Woody Allen

36.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

39.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

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

42.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

43.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

44.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

45.

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

Franklin, Aretha

46.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

50.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio