Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

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.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Addison, Joseph

10.

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

11.

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

G. K. Chesterton

12.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

13.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

23.

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

Martin Luther

24.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

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

J. K. Rowling

26.

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

27.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

28.

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

29.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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.

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

32.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

33.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

34.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

35.

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