Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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

George Santayana

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

Miller, Henry

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

Lennon, John

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

Rattle, Simon

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

10.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

11.

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

12.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

16.

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

Winter, Arthur

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

19.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

21.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

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

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

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

Plato

26.

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

27.

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

Gibbons, Billy

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

John Erskine

32.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

33.

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

George Bernard Shaw

34.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

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

37.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

38.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

39.

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

40.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

42.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

43.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

44.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

46.

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

47.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

48.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

49.

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

50.

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