Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- John Erskine

Best Quotes about Music

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Cocteau, Jean

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

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

16.

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)

17.

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.

18.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

19.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

20.

[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

21.

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

John Erskine

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

24.

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

25.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

26.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

27.

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

Newman, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

30.

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

Woody Allen

31.

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

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Wilson, Colin

34.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

35.

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

Addison, Joseph

36.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

37.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

38.

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

Martin Luther

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

41.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

42.

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

Zappa, Frank

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

47.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

48.

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