Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

10.

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

11.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

12.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

13.

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

14.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

15.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

16.

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

17.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

18.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

Wilson, Colin

20.

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

Ed Gardner

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

30.

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

31.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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)

33.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

34.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

35.

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

John Erskine

36.

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

37.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

38.

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

39.

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

Zappa, Frank

40.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

42.

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

43.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

44.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

45.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

47.

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

Pepys, Samuel

48.

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

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence