Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Luther, Martin

Best Quotes about Music

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

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

Plato

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

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

10.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

11.

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

George Santayana

12.

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

13.

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

Dan Rather

14.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

21.

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

G. K. Chesterton

22.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

Aldous Huxley

26.

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

27.

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

Lennon, John

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Szell, George

30.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

31.

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

J. K. Rowling

32.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

33.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

34.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

35.

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

Gibbons, Billy

36.

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

Miller, Henry

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

41.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Woody Allen

43.

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

44.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

Martin Luther

50.

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