Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Green, Benny

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

10.

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

George Bernard Shaw

11.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

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

Oscar Wilde

13.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

14.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

15.

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

16.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

17.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

18.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

19.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

21.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

22.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

24.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

25.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

26.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

27.

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

28.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

29.

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

30.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

31.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

32.

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

33.

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

Huneker, James G.

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.

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

Lennon, John

36.

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

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Wordsworth, William

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

42.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

43.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

44.

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

John Erskine

45.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

47.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

48.

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

Plato

49.

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

Cocteau, Jean

50.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert