Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Johnson, James Weldon

Best Quotes about Music

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Attali, Jacques

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

10.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

11.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

12.

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

G. K. Chesterton

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

15.

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

Addison, Joseph

16.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

18.

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

Dietz, Howard

19.

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

Franklin, Aretha

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

27.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

28.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

29.

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

30.

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

Kin Hubbard

31.

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

Lennon, John

32.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

33.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

34.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

35.

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

36.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

37.

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

38.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

42.

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

43.

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

Plato

44.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

45.

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

46.

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

Szell, George

47.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

48.

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

49.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

50.

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