Motivational Quotes

Music

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

- Keats, John

Best Quotes about Music

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

George Eliot

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

George Bernard Shaw

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

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

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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

Wilson, Colin

10.

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

Wordsworth, William

11.

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

Lennon, John

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

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

14.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

15.

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

16.

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

Brown, James

17.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

25.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

26.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

27.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

28.

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

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

Franklin, Aretha

31.

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

Zappa, Frank

32.

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

33.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

34.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

38.

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

39.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

47.

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

Huneker, James G.

48.

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