Motivational Quotes

Music

My music is best understood by children and animals.

- Igor Stravinsky

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Dietz, Howard

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

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

Brown, James

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

10.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

14.

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

15.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

16.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

22.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

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.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

26.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Attali, Jacques

29.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

30.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

31.

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

32.

[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

33.

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

34.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

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

Dan Rather

36.

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

37.

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

G. K. Chesterton

38.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

39.

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)

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

42.

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

43.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

47.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

48.

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

49.

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

Newman, Ernest

50.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp