Motivational Quotes

Music

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Music

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Cocteau, Jean

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

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

Schnabel, Artur

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

10.

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.

11.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

12.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Gibbons, Billy

15.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Dietz, Howard

19.

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

Oscar Wilde

20.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

21.

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

Huxley, Aldous

22.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

23.

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

Zappa, Frank

24.

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

Davis, Miles

25.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

26.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

27.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

28.

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

29.

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

Huneker, James G.

30.

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

Plato

31.

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

32.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

35.

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

36.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

37.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

41.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

42.

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

43.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

44.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

45.

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

46.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

47.

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

48.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

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

50.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von