Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

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

Ed Gardner

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Miller, Henry

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

10.

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

Armstrong, Louis

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Brown, James

14.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

15.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

16.

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

Attali, Jacques

17.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

21.

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

John Erskine

22.

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

Plato

23.

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

24.

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

Sousa, John Philip

25.

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

Szell, George

26.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

27.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

28.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

32.

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)

33.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

35.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

36.

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

Hugo, Victor

37.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

38.

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

39.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

40.

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

41.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

46.

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

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.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

49.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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