Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Lennon, John

Best Quotes about Music

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Johnson, James Weldon

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

10.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

14.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

15.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

16.

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

17.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

18.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

Gibbons, Billy

26.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

27.

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

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

33.

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

Wordsworth, William

34.

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

Wilson, Colin

35.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

39.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

40.

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

41.

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

Armstrong, Louis

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

45.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

47.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

48.

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

Dietz, Howard

49.

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

Oscar Wilde

50.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil