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

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

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Plato

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

10.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

11.

[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

12.

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

13.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

14.

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

15.

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)

16.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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.

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

Davis, Miles

20.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

23.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

24.

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.

25.

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

Plutarch

26.

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

Huneker, James G.

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

Lennon, John

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

31.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

32.

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

33.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

37.

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

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.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

40.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

42.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

43.

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

44.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

45.

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

46.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

47.

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