Motivational Quotes

Music

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

- Holly, Buddy

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

10.

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

11.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

12.

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

13.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

14.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

15.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

16.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

17.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

18.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

19.

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

20.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

Attali, Jacques

22.

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

G. K. Chesterton

23.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

24.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

30.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

31.

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

Gore, Tipper

32.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

33.

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

Armstrong, Louis

34.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

38.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

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

Green, Benny

42.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

John Erskine

48.

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

Gibbons, Billy

49.

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