Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

- Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Best Quotes about Music

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Ed Gardner

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

Auden, W. H.

10.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

11.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

15.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

16.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

17.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

23.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

24.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

25.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

27.

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

J. K. Rowling

28.

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

Pepys, Samuel

29.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

30.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

31.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

32.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Franklin, Aretha

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

41.

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

Lynn, Loretta

42.

[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

43.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

44.

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

45.

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

Davis, Miles

46.

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

Gore, Tipper

47.

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

48.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

49.

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

50.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul