Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Music

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

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

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

Martin Luther

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

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

Franklin, Aretha

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

10.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

11.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

15.

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

16.

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

Armstrong, Louis

17.

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

Huneker, James G.

18.

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

Gibbons, Billy

19.

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

20.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

21.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

22.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

23.

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

Green, Benny

24.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

25.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Szell, George

29.

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

Zappa, Frank

30.

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

31.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

33.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

34.

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

35.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

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

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

40.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

41.

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

Oscar Wilde

42.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

43.

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

44.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

45.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

46.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

Wilson, Colin

48.

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

Addison, Joseph

49.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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