Motivational Quotes

Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

- Stravinsky, Igor

Best Quotes about Music

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

Gore, Tipper

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

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

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

Lennon, John

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

Luther, Martin

10.

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

11.

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

Pepys, Samuel

12.

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

13.

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

Lynn, Loretta

14.

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

15.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

16.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

17.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

18.

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

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.

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

21.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

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

23.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

24.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

25.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

26.

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

27.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

28.

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

Wilson, Colin

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

32.

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

Dietz, Howard

33.

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

Kin Hubbard

34.

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

G. K. Chesterton

35.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

36.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

37.

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

38.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

Zappa, Frank

41.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

42.

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

George Santayana

43.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

44.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

Ed Gardner

46.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

47.

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

48.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

49.

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

50.

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