Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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

Szell, George

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

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

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

10.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

16.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

18.

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

19.

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

20.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

21.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

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

24.

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

Ruskin, John

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

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

27.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

28.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

29.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

31.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

32.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

33.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

34.

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

35.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

36.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

37.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

38.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

39.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

43.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

44.

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

45.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

46.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

47.

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

Oscar Wilde

48.

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