Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

Auden, W. H.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

10.

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

George Santayana

11.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

12.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

15.

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

16.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

17.

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

Addison, Joseph

18.

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

Szell, George

19.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

20.

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

George Eliot

21.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Aldous Huxley

25.

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

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.

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

28.

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

Billings, Josh

29.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

30.

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

Plato

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

35.

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

Oscar Wilde

36.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

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

George Bernard Shaw

39.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

45.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

46.

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

Huneker, James G.

47.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

48.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

50.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante