Motivational Quotes

Music

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

- Levi-Strauss, Claude

Best Quotes about Music

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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

Rattle, Simon

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

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

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

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

12.

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

Dan Rather

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

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

15.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

16.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

17.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Brown, James

21.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

22.

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

George Eliot

23.

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

George Santayana

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.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

26.

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

Armstrong, Louis

27.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

28.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

29.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

30.

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

Pepys, Samuel

31.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

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

33.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

34.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

35.

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

Miller, Henry

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

41.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

42.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

43.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

44.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

45.

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

Cocteau, Jean

46.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

48.

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.