Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sousa, John Philip

Best Quotes about Music

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

Ruskin, John

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

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

Zappa, Frank

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Szell, George

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Martin Luther

14.

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

Gore, Tipper

15.

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

16.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

18.

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

19.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Schnabel, Artur

25.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

26.

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

Green, Benny

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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)

30.

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

George Santayana

31.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

33.

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

34.

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

Lynn, Loretta

35.

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

Mencken, H. L.

36.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

37.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

40.

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

Plutarch

41.

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

42.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

43.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

44.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

45.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

46.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

47.

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

Gibbons, Billy

48.

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.