Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

10.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

11.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

12.

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

John Erskine

13.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

14.

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

Pepys, Samuel

15.

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

Newman, Ernest

16.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

17.

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.

18.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

19.

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

20.

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

Brown, James

21.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

22.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

23.

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

24.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

25.

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

26.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

31.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

32.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

33.

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

Armstrong, Louis

34.

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

35.

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

Woody Allen

36.

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

37.

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

Davis, Miles

38.

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

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Martin Luther

41.

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

Zappa, Frank

42.

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

43.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

Rattle, Simon

49.

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

Plutarch

50.

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

Aldous Huxley