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

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

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

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

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

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

J. K. Rowling

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

Gibbons, Billy

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Miller, Henry

13.

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

14.

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

Wilson, Colin

15.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

Wordsworth, William

21.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

22.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

23.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

24.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

25.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

29.

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

Lynn, Loretta

30.

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

31.

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

Schnabel, Artur

32.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

33.

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

Kin Hubbard

34.

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

35.

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

George Bernard Shaw

36.

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

Martin Luther

37.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

38.

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.

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

45.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

46.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.