Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Schnabel, Artur

Best Quotes about Music

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

Woody Allen

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Zappa, Frank

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

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

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

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

10.

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

Ruskin, John

11.

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

Newman, Ernest

12.

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

J. K. Rowling

13.

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

14.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

15.

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

16.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

17.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

18.

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

19.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

20.

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

21.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

22.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

23.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

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

25.

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

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.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Martin Luther

32.

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

33.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

34.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

35.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

39.

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

Brown, James

40.

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

41.

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

Dan Rather

42.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

43.

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

44.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

45.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

46.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

47.

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

48.

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

Lennon, John

49.

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