Motivational Quotes

Music

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

- Starr, Ringo

Best Quotes about Music

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Dietz, Howard

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

William Shakespeare

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

Miller, Henry

10.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

11.

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

Lennon, John

12.

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

John Erskine

13.

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

14.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

15.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

17.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Huneker, James G.

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Davis, Miles

23.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

24.

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

25.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

26.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

27.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

28.

[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

29.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

30.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

31.

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

Gore, Tipper

32.

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

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

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

35.

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

Pepys, Samuel

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

41.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

42.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

43.

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

44.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

45.

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

46.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

49.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

50.

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.

William Shakespeare