Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Miller, Henry

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Plato

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

George Bernard Shaw

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

10.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

11.

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

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

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

14.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

John Erskine

19.

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

Dietz, Howard

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

23.

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

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

26.

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

Franklin, Aretha

27.

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

28.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

29.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

30.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

31.

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

George Santayana

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Brown, James

37.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

43.

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

44.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

45.

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

Wordsworth, William

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

48.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

49.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

50.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael