Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Szell, George

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

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

Ruskin, John

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

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

Aldous Huxley

12.

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

13.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

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

16.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

17.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

21.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

22.

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

23.

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

Winter, Arthur

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.

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

26.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

27.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

28.

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

G. K. Chesterton

29.

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

Plato

30.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

31.

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

32.

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

33.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

34.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

35.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

36.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

37.

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

Brown, James

38.

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

39.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

44.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

Davis, Miles

47.

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

48.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

49.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

50.

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

William Shakespeare