Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Szell, George

Best Quotes about Music

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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

Dietz, Howard

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Brown, James

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

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

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

Ed Gardner

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

10.

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

Gibbons, Billy

11.

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

12.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

14.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

15.

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

16.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

17.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

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

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

23.

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

Brown, James

24.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

26.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

33.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

34.

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

Wilson, Colin

35.

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

J. K. Rowling

36.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

39.

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

40.

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

Pepys, Samuel

41.

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

42.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

43.

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

Auden, W. H.

44.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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.