Motivational Quotes

Music

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

- Martin Luther

Best Quotes about Music

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Woody Allen

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

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

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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

10.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

11.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

12.

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

13.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

15.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

16.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

20.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

25.

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

Lennon, John

26.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

27.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

28.

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

29.

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

Luther, Martin

30.

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

31.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

32.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

33.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

34.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

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

38.

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

John Erskine

39.

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

40.

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.

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.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

43.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

44.

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)

45.

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

46.

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

Addison, Joseph

47.

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

48.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

49.

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

50.

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

Gibbons, Billy