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, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

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

Plutarch

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

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

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

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

Pepys, Samuel

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

13.

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

John Erskine

14.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

15.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

16.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

17.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

19.

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

Huneker, James G.

20.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

24.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

25.

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.

26.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

27.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

30.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

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

Lynn, Loretta

32.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

33.

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

34.

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

Aldous Huxley

35.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

36.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

37.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

38.

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

39.

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

Huxley, Aldous

40.

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

Dietz, Howard

41.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Davis, Miles

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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.