Motivational Quotes

Music

My music is best understood by children and animals.

- Igor Stravinsky

Best Quotes about Music

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

Ruskin, John

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

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

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

Dietz, Howard

10.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Zappa, Frank

12.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

14.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

15.

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

Gibbons, Billy

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.

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

Lynn, Loretta

18.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

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

23.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

24.

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

Dan Rather

25.

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

26.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

31.

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

Miller, Henry

32.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

33.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

34.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Rattle, Simon

37.

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

George Bernard Shaw

38.

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

Plutarch

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

41.

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

Lennon, John

42.

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

John Erskine

43.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

45.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

46.

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

Green, Benny

47.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

48.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

50.

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