Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Dan Rather

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

J. K. Rowling

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

Dietz, Howard

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

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

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

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

George Santayana

10.

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

Schnabel, Artur

11.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

12.

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

Newman, Ernest

13.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

14.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

15.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

16.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

17.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

18.

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

Szell, George

19.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

21.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

22.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

23.

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

G. K. Chesterton

24.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

25.

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

Addison, Joseph

26.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

27.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

28.

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

29.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

30.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

31.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

36.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

37.

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

Gibbons, Billy

38.

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

39.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

Luther, Martin

41.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

42.

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

43.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

44.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

Zappa, Frank

46.

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