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

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

Zappa, Frank

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

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

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

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

George Eliot

10.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

11.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

12.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

13.

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

14.

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

Billings, Josh

15.

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

16.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

18.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

19.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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.

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

Wordsworth, William

22.

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

Oscar Wilde

23.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

24.

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

25.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

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

Addison, Joseph

27.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

28.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

29.

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

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

32.

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

33.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Franklin, Aretha

36.

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

37.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

38.

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.

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Miller, Henry

41.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

42.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

43.

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

44.

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

45.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

46.

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

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

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

Davis, Miles

49.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

50.

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