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

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

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

Dan Rather

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Ruskin, John

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

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

George Santayana

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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.

12.

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

Oscar Wilde

13.

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

Plato

14.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

15.

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

16.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

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

Armstrong, Louis

18.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

19.

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

Rattle, Simon

20.

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

Plutarch

21.

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

22.

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

Szell, George

23.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

24.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

25.

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

26.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

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

Newman, Ernest

31.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

32.

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

33.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Schnabel, Artur

41.

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

Lynn, Loretta

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Wordsworth, William

46.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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