Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Pavarotti, Luciano

Best Quotes about Music

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Mencken, H. L.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

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

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)

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

Szell, George

11.

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

Franklin, Aretha

12.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

13.

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

Huneker, James G.

14.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

15.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

16.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

17.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

18.

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

19.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

20.

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

Wilson, Colin

21.

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

John Erskine

22.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

23.

[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

24.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

25.

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

Pepys, Samuel

26.

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

Ed Gardner

27.

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

28.

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

29.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

30.

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

31.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

32.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Miller, Henry

35.

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

36.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

37.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

38.

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

39.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

40.

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

41.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

42.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

43.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

44.

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

Zappa, Frank

45.

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

Gibbons, Billy

46.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

50.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe