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 is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

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.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

10.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

11.

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

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

13.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

14.

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

Miller, Henry

15.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

16.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

17.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

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

Zappa, Frank

22.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

24.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

25.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

26.

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

27.

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

Luther, Martin

28.

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

Billings, Josh

29.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

Dietz, Howard

31.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

32.

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

33.

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

Martin Luther

34.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

35.

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

Hugo, Victor

36.

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

37.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

38.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

42.

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

Lennon, John

43.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

44.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

45.

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

46.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

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.

[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

49.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill