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

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

10.

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

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

12.

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

Dan Rather

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

18.

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

19.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

20.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

21.

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

Woody Allen

22.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

24.

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

25.

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

Huxley, Aldous

26.

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

27.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

28.

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

Davis, Miles

29.

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

30.

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

Newman, Ernest

31.

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

Billings, Josh

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

38.

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

39.

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

Luther, Martin

40.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

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

Franklin, Aretha

42.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

43.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

44.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

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

46.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

47.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Gore, Tipper