Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

Gibbons, Billy

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

Ed Gardner

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

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

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

10.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

11.

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

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

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

Cocteau, Jean

14.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

18.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

19.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

20.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

21.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

22.

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

23.

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

Kin Hubbard

24.

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

25.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

27.

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

Brown, James

28.

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

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

31.

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

32.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

33.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

36.

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

Addison, Joseph

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

39.

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

Dan Rather

40.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

41.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

42.

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

43.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

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

49.

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

Woody Allen

50.

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