Motivational Quotes

Music

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

- Holly, Buddy

Best Quotes about Music

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

Rattle, Simon

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

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

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

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

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

10.

[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

11.

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

Schnabel, Artur

12.

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

Lynn, Loretta

13.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

14.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

15.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

18.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

19.

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

Franklin, Aretha

20.

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

Attali, Jacques

21.

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

22.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

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.

24.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Ed Gardner

28.

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

29.

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

30.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

31.

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

John Erskine

32.

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

Dietz, Howard

33.

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

34.

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

Woody Allen

35.

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

36.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

37.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

40.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

41.

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

42.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

43.

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

Wilson, Colin

44.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

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

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

Green, Benny

48.

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

49.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano