Motivational Quotes

Music

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.

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Davis, Miles

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

Plato

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

11.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

[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

17.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

18.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

19.

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

20.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

21.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

22.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

23.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

24.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

28.

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.

29.

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

Kin Hubbard

30.

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

31.

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

Cocteau, Jean

32.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

33.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

34.

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

35.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

39.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Aldous Huxley

43.

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

44.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

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

46.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

47.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

48.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

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

50.

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