Motivational Quotes

Music

Music should never be harmless.

- Robertson, Robbie

Best Quotes about Music

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

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

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

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

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

Lennon, John

14.

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

Franklin, Aretha

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

21.

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

Brown, James

22.

[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

23.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

24.

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

25.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

26.

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

27.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

28.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

31.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

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

Newman, Ernest

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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

Cocteau, Jean

37.

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

38.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

39.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

40.

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

41.

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

Huxley, Aldous

42.

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

George Santayana

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

47.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

48.

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

Ruskin, John

49.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

50.

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.