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

[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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

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

Miller, Henry

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

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

Pepys, Samuel

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

11.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

12.

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

13.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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.

Steiner, George

17.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

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

19.

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

Davis, Miles

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

23.

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

24.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

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

George Bernard Shaw

27.

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

28.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

29.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

30.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

31.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

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

33.

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

Franklin, Aretha

34.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

35.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

36.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

37.

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

Plato

38.

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

39.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

40.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

41.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

42.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

43.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

44.

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

45.

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)

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur