Motivational Quotes

Music

My music is best understood by children and animals.

- Igor Stravinsky

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

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

Lennon, John

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

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

Auden, W. H.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

14.

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

Wilson, Colin

15.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

16.

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

17.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

19.

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

Dietz, Howard

20.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

21.

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

22.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

23.

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

24.

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

Green, Benny

25.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

26.

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

27.

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

Huneker, James G.

28.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

33.

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

Attali, Jacques

34.

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

Plutarch

35.

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

Woody Allen

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

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

38.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

39.

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

40.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

44.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

45.

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

Zappa, Frank

46.

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