Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Music

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

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

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

10.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

11.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

12.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

13.

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

Newman, Ernest

14.

[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

15.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

16.

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

Pepys, Samuel

17.

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

Szell, George

18.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

19.

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

20.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

21.

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

22.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

23.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

25.

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

26.

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

Woody Allen

27.

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

28.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

29.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

30.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

31.

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

Oscar Wilde

32.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

33.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

34.

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

Miller, Henry

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Attali, Jacques

37.

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

38.

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

Rattle, Simon

39.

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

40.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

43.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

44.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

48.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

49.

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.

50.

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