Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Music

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

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

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

Johnson, James Weldon

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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)

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.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

11.

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

12.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

13.

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

Szell, George

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

16.

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

Aldous Huxley

17.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

18.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

19.

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

20.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

23.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Plato

28.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

29.

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

Gibbons, Billy

30.

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

Lennon, John

31.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

32.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

37.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

38.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

39.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Wordsworth, William

42.

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

43.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

44.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

45.

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

Rattle, Simon

46.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

47.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

48.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

49.

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

50.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther