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

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

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

Brown, James

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

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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

10.

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

Dietz, Howard

11.

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

12.

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

Dan Rather

13.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

14.

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

Schnabel, Artur

15.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

16.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

17.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

18.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

19.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

20.

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

21.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

25.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

26.

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

John Erskine

27.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

28.

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

Wordsworth, William

29.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

34.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

35.

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

36.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

37.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

38.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

39.

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

Brown, James

40.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

41.

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

42.

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

Miller, Henry

43.

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

44.

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

George Eliot

45.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

46.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

47.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

48.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

50.

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