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 never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

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

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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.

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

10.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

Gibbons, Billy

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

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

16.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

17.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

18.

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

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

21.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

22.

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

Dietz, Howard

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

28.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

29.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

30.

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

Davis, Miles

31.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

32.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

34.

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

35.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Sousa, John Philip

42.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

43.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

44.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

45.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

46.

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

47.

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

Luther, Martin

48.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

49.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

50.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas