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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Armstrong, Louis

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

Rattle, Simon

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

John Erskine

13.

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

14.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

15.

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

Woody Allen

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

20.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

23.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

24.

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

Green, Benny

25.

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

Davis, Miles

26.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

27.

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

Ed Gardner

28.

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

Dietz, Howard

29.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

30.

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

31.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

32.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

33.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

34.

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

Brown, James

35.

[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

36.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

37.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

40.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

41.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

42.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

43.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

44.

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

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

Sousa, John Philip

46.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

47.

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

48.

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

Attali, Jacques

49.

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

George Bernard Shaw

50.

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