Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

- Latham, Geoffrey

Best Quotes about Music

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

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

Ruskin, John

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

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

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Addison, Joseph

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

Brown, James

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

25.

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

Brown, James

26.

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

Wilson, Colin

27.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

28.

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

Dan Rather

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

32.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

33.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

34.

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

35.

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

Schnabel, Artur

36.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

37.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Franklin, Aretha

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

Aldous Huxley

42.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

43.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

44.

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

45.

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

Huneker, James G.

46.

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.

47.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

48.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

49.

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

50.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas