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 and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Brown, James

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

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

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

12.

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

13.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

14.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

15.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

17.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

18.

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

19.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

20.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

21.

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

J. K. Rowling

22.

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

23.

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

George Eliot

24.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

25.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

26.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Aldous Huxley

32.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

33.

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

Pepys, Samuel

34.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

35.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

43.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

45.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

46.

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

Oscar Wilde

47.

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)

48.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

49.

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

Woody Allen

50.

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