Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

George Bernard Shaw

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)

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

12.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

18.

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

Plato

19.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

20.

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.

21.

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

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.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

24.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

28.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

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

Brown, James

34.

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

35.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

36.

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

Davis, Miles

37.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

38.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

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

Plutarch

42.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

43.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

44.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

45.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

46.

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

Ruskin, John

47.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

48.

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

49.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

50.

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