Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

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

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

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

Wordsworth, William

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

12.

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

13.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

14.

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

15.

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

Huxley, Aldous

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

Luther, Martin

18.

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

Woody Allen

19.

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

20.

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

Zappa, Frank

21.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

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

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

25.

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

Attali, Jacques

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

George Eliot

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

31.

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

Wilson, Colin

32.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

33.

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.

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Huneker, James G.

36.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

44.

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

John Erskine

45.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

46.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

47.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

48.

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

Pepys, Samuel

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 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