Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- John Erskine

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Wilde, Oscar

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

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

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

10.

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

Green, Benny

11.

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

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

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

15.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Gibbons, Billy

17.

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

18.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

21.

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

Zappa, Frank

22.

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

Plutarch

23.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

29.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

30.

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

Newman, Ernest

31.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

32.

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

33.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Luther, Martin

35.

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

Woody Allen

36.

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

Huneker, James G.

37.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

38.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

39.

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

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

43.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

44.

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

Plato

45.

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

Rattle, Simon

46.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

47.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

48.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

49.

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

50.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean