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

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

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

10.

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

Schnabel, Artur

11.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

12.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

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

Brown, James

14.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

15.

[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

16.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

17.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

18.

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

19.

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

Plutarch

20.

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

Armstrong, Louis

21.

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

Ruskin, John

22.

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

23.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

24.

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

Johnson, Samuel

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

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

Attali, Jacques

27.

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

28.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

32.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

33.

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

34.

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

Martin Luther

35.

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

36.

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

Davis, Miles

37.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

38.

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

39.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

40.

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.

41.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

42.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

43.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

44.

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

45.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

46.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

48.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

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

Lynn, Loretta