Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

Newman, Ernest

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

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

Zappa, Frank

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

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

10.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

11.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

12.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

G. K. Chesterton

14.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

15.

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

16.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

17.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

18.

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

Johnson, Samuel

19.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

20.

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

Gore, Tipper

21.

[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

22.

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

Wordsworth, William

23.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

24.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

25.

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

26.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

30.

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

Oscar Wilde

31.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

32.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

33.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

36.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

37.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

38.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

39.

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

40.

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

Dan Rather

41.

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

42.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

43.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

44.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

45.

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

46.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas