Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Plato

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

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

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

10.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

11.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

12.

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

13.

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

Huneker, James G.

14.

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

Oscar Wilde

15.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

16.

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

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.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

19.

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

Winter, Arthur

20.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

22.

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

George Santayana

23.

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

24.

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

Pepys, Samuel

25.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

26.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

27.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

28.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

30.

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

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.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

36.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

37.

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

38.

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

39.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

44.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

47.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

48.

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

49.

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

Woody Allen

50.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan