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

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

Ruskin, John

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Armstrong, Louis

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

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

13.

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

14.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

15.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

16.

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

17.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

18.

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

19.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

20.

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

Dietz, Howard

21.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

22.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

23.

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

John Erskine

24.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

25.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

26.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

27.

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

28.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

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.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

31.

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

32.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

37.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

40.

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

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

42.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

43.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

44.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

45.

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

46.

Steiner, George

47.

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

Brown, James

48.

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

Woody Allen

49.

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

Tate, Jeffrey