Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

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

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

Miller, Henry

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

Lennon, John

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

10.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

11.

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

Franklin, Aretha

12.

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

Davis, Miles

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

Billings, Josh

17.

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

18.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

19.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

22.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

25.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

26.

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

George Bernard Shaw

27.

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

Newman, Ernest

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

32.

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

33.

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

Rattle, Simon

34.

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

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

37.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

38.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

39.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

40.

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

41.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

42.

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

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

50.

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

Gibbons, Billy