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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

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

Lennon, John

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

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

10.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

11.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

12.

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

Huxley, Aldous

13.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

14.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

15.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

16.

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

17.

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

John Erskine

18.

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

Brown, James

19.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

20.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

21.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

22.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

24.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

25.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

26.

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

27.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

28.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

29.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

33.

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

George Santayana

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Dietz, Howard

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Woody Allen

43.

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

Newman, Ernest

44.

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

45.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Lynn, Loretta

49.

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

Ruskin, John

50.

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

Plato