Motivational Quotes

Music

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.

Best Quotes about Music

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

George Santayana

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

Zappa, Frank

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

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

Gibbons, Billy

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

14.

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

15.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

16.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

18.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

19.

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

20.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

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

Ed Gardner

22.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

23.

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

Martin Luther

24.

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

25.

[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

26.

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

Attali, Jacques

27.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

28.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

29.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

30.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

36.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

37.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

38.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

Gore, Tipper

41.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

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 lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

44.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

45.

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

Pepys, Samuel

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

Franklin, Aretha

48.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

49.

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

50.

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