Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Kin Hubbard

[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

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

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

Miller, Henry

14.

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

15.

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

Ed Gardner

16.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

Gore, Tipper

21.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

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

George Eliot

23.

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

24.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

25.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

26.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

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

Pepys, Samuel

29.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

30.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

32.

Marcus, Greil

33.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

34.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

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

40.

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

Aldous Huxley

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

44.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

45.

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

46.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

47.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

49.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

50.

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

Davis, Miles