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

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

J. K. Rowling

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

Wordsworth, William

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

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

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

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

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

Luther, Martin

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

10.

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

11.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

12.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

13.

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

Schnabel, Artur

14.

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

Zappa, Frank

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Lennon, John

21.

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

22.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

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

Ed Gardner

24.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

25.

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

26.

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

Brown, James

27.

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

Armstrong, Louis

28.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

29.

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

30.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

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

Franklin, Aretha

33.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

35.

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

Lynn, Loretta

36.

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

37.

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

Dietz, Howard

38.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

39.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

40.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

41.

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

42.

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

Huxley, Aldous

43.

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

44.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

45.

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

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

47.

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