Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Plato

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Zappa, Frank

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

12.

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

Szell, George

13.

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

Dietz, Howard

14.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

15.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

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

17.

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

Lennon, John

18.

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

19.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

20.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

21.

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

22.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

23.

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

Billings, Josh

24.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

25.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

26.

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

27.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

29.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Newman, Ernest

32.

[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

33.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

34.

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

Huxley, Aldous

35.

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

Attali, Jacques

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

40.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

41.

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

Armstrong, Louis

42.

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

John Erskine

43.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

44.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

45.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

46.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

47.

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

48.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

49.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

50.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max