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

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

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

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

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

Aldous Huxley

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

12.

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

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

15.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

18.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

20.

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

Martin Luther

21.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

22.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

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.

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

Rattle, Simon

28.

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

Hugo, Victor

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 is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

32.

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

Dietz, Howard

33.

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

34.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

35.

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

Billings, Josh

36.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

37.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

38.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

39.

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.

40.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

41.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

42.

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

Armstrong, Louis

43.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

44.

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

45.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

47.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

48.

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

John Erskine

49.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

50.

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