Motivational Quotes

Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

- Stravinsky, Igor

Best Quotes about Music

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

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

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.

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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

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

Winter, Arthur

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

Franklin, Aretha

10.

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

11.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

12.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

13.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

19.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

20.

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

21.

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

Newman, Ernest

22.

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

23.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

24.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

25.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

26.

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

27.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

28.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

Zappa, Frank

31.

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

32.

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

Miller, Henry

33.

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

Lynn, Loretta

34.

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

George Santayana

35.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

36.

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

Lennon, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

42.

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