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

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

[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

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

10.

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

Szell, George

11.

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

12.

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

Winter, Arthur

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

15.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

16.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

17.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

18.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

19.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

20.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

21.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

26.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

27.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

28.

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

29.

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

Lennon, John

30.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

31.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

32.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

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

Franklin, Aretha

35.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

36.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

37.

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

38.

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

Kin Hubbard

39.

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

40.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

41.

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

42.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

43.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

44.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

Brown, James

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Gibbons, Billy