Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Music

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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.

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

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

Attali, Jacques

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

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

10.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

11.

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

Luther, Martin

12.

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

Brown, James

13.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

14.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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

17.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

19.

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

Gibbons, Billy

20.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

22.

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

George Eliot

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

30.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

31.

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

32.

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

Billings, Josh

33.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

36.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

39.

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

Woody Allen

40.

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

41.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

42.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

43.

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

44.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

45.

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

46.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

47.

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

Pepys, Samuel

48.

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

Lennon, John

49.

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

50.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van