Motivational Quotes

Music

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

- Mascagni, Pietro

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

10.

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.

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

18.

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

Aldous Huxley

19.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

20.

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

21.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

22.

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

Wilson, Colin

23.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

24.

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

25.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

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

Brown, James

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

33.

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)

34.

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

Rattle, Simon

35.

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

36.

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

Attali, Jacques

37.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

38.

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

39.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

40.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

41.

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

Hugo, Victor

42.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

43.

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

44.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

48.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

49.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

50.

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