Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

Ed Gardner

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

10.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Huxley, Aldous

12.

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.

13.

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

Gore, Tipper

14.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

15.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

16.

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

17.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

18.

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

19.

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

Zappa, Frank

20.

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

Wilson, Colin

21.

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

22.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

George Santayana

24.

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

Addison, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

29.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

30.

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

31.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

32.

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)

33.

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

Miller, Henry

34.

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

George Eliot

35.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

36.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

37.

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

Gibbons, Billy

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Brown, James

44.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

45.

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

Dietz, Howard

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

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