Motivational Quotes

Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

- Stravinsky, Igor

Best Quotes about Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

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

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Auden, W. H.

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

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

10.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

14.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

15.

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.

16.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

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

18.

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

Wilson, Colin

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

22.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

23.

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

24.

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

Lynn, Loretta

25.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

26.

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

27.

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

Davis, Miles

28.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Ed Gardner

32.

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

Sousa, John Philip

33.

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

Addison, Joseph

34.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

35.

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

Wordsworth, William

36.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

37.

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

Billings, Josh

38.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

41.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

42.

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

43.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

44.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

46.

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

Gibbons, Billy

47.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

48.

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

49.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

50.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert