Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

Best Quotes about Music

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

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

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Newman, Ernest

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

13.

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

14.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

15.

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

Dietz, Howard

16.

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

17.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

Lennon, John

19.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

20.

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

Aldous Huxley

21.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

22.

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

23.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

24.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

George Eliot

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

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

Ed Gardner

33.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

37.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

38.

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

Billings, Josh

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

41.

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

Hugo, Victor

42.

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

Addison, Joseph

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

47.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

48.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

49.

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

50.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton