Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Music

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

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

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Franklin, Aretha

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

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Aldous Huxley

10.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

11.

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

Wilson, Colin

12.

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)

13.

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

Plato

14.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

15.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

16.

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

Green, Benny

17.

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

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

27.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

32.

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

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

35.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

36.

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

37.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

40.

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

Davis, Miles

41.

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

42.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

43.

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

Ruskin, John

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

47.

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

Billings, Josh

48.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

49.

Song is the heroics of speech.