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

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

Wordsworth, William

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

10.

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.

11.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

12.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

13.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

14.

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

George Bernard Shaw

15.

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

16.

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

Schnabel, Artur

17.

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

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

21.

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

Franklin, Aretha

22.

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

23.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

25.

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

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

29.

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

George Eliot

30.

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

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

33.

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

34.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Gibbons, Billy

36.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

37.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

38.

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)

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

41.

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

Johnson, Samuel

42.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

Green, Benny

47.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

48.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.