Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

10.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

11.

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

12.

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

Newman, Ernest

13.

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

John Erskine

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

16.

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

17.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

18.

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

19.

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

George Santayana

20.

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

Wordsworth, William

21.

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

22.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

23.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

28.

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

Attali, Jacques

29.

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

30.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

31.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

32.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

33.

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

34.

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

Kin Hubbard

35.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

36.

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

37.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

38.

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

George Eliot

39.

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

Sousa, John Philip

40.

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

41.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

45.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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.

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

Lynn, Loretta

49.

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

Pepys, Samuel

50.

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.