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

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

13.

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.

14.

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

Luther, Martin

15.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

16.

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

George Santayana

17.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

18.

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

Dietz, Howard

19.

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

Plutarch

20.

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

G. K. Chesterton

21.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

22.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

23.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Davis, Miles

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

34.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

37.

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

38.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

39.

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

40.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

41.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

43.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

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

Martin Luther

46.

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

Dan Rather

47.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

48.

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

49.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

50.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido