Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Newman, Ernest

Best Quotes about Music

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

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Miller, Henry

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Addison, Joseph

10.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

12.

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

Lennon, John

13.

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

14.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

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

Plato

16.

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

John Erskine

17.

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

Szell, George

18.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

Huneker, James G.

20.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

21.

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

22.

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

Attali, Jacques

23.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

24.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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.

26.

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

Wordsworth, William

27.

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

J. K. Rowling

28.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

29.

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

30.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

32.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

33.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

34.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

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

36.

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

Huxley, Aldous

37.

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

38.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

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

43.

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

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

50.

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