Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Newman, Ernest

Best Quotes about Music

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

Luther, Martin

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

10.

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

11.

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

George Santayana

12.

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

13.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

14.

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

15.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

19.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

20.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

22.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

23.

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

Oscar Wilde

24.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

28.

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

Lennon, John

29.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

30.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

32.

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

33.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

34.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

35.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

36.

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

37.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Kin Hubbard

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

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

Brown, James

42.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

43.

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

Aldous Huxley

44.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

45.

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

46.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

47.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

48.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

49.

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

50.

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