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

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

Rattle, Simon

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Newman, Ernest

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

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

Schnabel, Artur

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

William Shakespeare

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

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

10.

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

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.

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

Winter, Arthur

13.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

14.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

15.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

Huxley, Aldous

18.

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

Franklin, Aretha

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

21.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

22.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

23.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

24.

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

John Erskine

25.

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

Armstrong, Louis

26.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

28.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

29.

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

Davis, Miles

30.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

31.

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

32.

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

Aldous Huxley

33.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

35.

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

Gibbons, Billy

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

39.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

40.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

41.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

42.

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

43.

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

Attali, Jacques

44.

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

45.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

46.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

47.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

48.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.