Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Thoreau, Henry David

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

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

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

10.

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

Wilson, Colin

11.

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

12.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

17.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

18.

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

19.

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

Dan Rather

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Lennon, John

29.

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

Huneker, James G.

30.

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)

31.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

34.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

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

Pepys, Samuel

36.

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

Dietz, Howard

37.

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

38.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

39.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

42.

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

43.

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

Plutarch

44.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

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

Zappa, Frank

46.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

48.

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

George Bernard Shaw

49.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

50.

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