Motivational Quotes

Music

The history of a people is found in its songs.

- Jellinek, George

Best Quotes about Music

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

Martin Luther

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

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

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

George Bernard Shaw

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

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

Rattle, Simon

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

Plutarch

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

Tate, Jeffrey

10.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

11.

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

12.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

13.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

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

21.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

22.

[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

23.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

30.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

31.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

32.

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

Woody Allen

33.

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

34.

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

Green, Benny

35.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

36.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

37.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

39.

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

40.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

41.

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.

42.

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

Aldous Huxley

43.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

45.

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

Brown, James

46.

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

47.

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

Huneker, James G.

48.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

49.

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

Attali, Jacques

50.

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