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

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

Auden, W. H.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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.

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

Gore, Tipper

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

14.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

16.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

17.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

19.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

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

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

George Eliot

25.

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

Oscar Wilde

26.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

27.

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

Davis, Miles

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

32.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Schnabel, Artur

34.

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

G. K. Chesterton

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

39.

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

Lennon, John

40.

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

John Erskine

41.

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

42.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

43.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

44.

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

45.

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