Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

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

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

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

J. K. Rowling

10.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

11.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

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

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Huxley, Aldous

16.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

17.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

18.

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

Zappa, Frank

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Lynn, Loretta

22.

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

Brown, James

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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.

25.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

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

Pepys, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

36.

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

37.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

38.

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

Gore, Tipper

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.

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

41.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

45.

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

46.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

47.

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

48.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

49.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

50.

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