Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Huxley, Aldous

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

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.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

12.

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

13.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

14.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

15.

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

Newman, Ernest

16.

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

17.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

22.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

23.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

24.

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

25.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

26.

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

27.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

28.

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

Sousa, John Philip

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

31.

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

32.

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

G. K. Chesterton

33.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

34.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

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

37.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Plato

40.

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

Armstrong, Louis

41.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

42.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Huneker, James G.

44.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

45.

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

Szell, George

46.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

47.

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

48.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

49.

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

50.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy