Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

- Robert Fripp

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Auden, W. H.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Schnabel, Artur

10.

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

11.

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

Lennon, John

12.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

13.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

15.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

16.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

17.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

18.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

19.

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

20.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

25.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

26.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

28.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

29.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

30.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

32.

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

Rattle, Simon

33.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

34.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

[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

36.

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

37.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Wordsworth, William

41.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

42.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

45.

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

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

Winter, Arthur

48.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

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

50.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude