Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Luther, Martin

Best Quotes about Music

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Wordsworth, William

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Gore, Tipper

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

William Shakespeare

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

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

10.

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

Newman, Ernest

11.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

Winter, Arthur

14.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

15.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

16.

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

17.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

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

19.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

20.

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

21.

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

Huxley, Aldous

22.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

23.

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

24.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

25.

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

Lennon, John

26.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

27.

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

Dan Rather

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Oscar Wilde

31.

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.

32.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

33.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

34.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

35.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

36.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

37.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Woody Allen

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

44.

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

Aldous Huxley

45.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

46.

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

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

49.

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

50.

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