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

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

Gibbons, Billy

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

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

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

Dan Rather

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

10.

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

Schnabel, Artur

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

15.

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

George Bernard Shaw

16.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Miller, Henry

20.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

24.

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

Armstrong, Louis

25.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

26.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

29.

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

30.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

31.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

32.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

33.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

34.

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

Hugo, Victor

35.

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

Pepys, Samuel

36.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Auden, W. H.

39.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

40.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

41.

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

Addison, Joseph

42.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

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

44.

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

Woody Allen

45.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

46.

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

Dietz, Howard

47.

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

48.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

49.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

50.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John