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

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

Zappa, Frank

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

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

Ed Gardner

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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

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

Miller, Henry

10.

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

Aldous Huxley

11.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

13.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

14.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

15.

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

16.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

17.

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

Brown, James

18.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Auden, W. H.

21.

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

Szell, George

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

29.

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

30.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

Davis, Miles

34.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

37.

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

38.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

39.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

40.

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

41.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

42.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

43.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

44.

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

J. K. Rowling

45.

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

46.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

47.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

48.

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

49.

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.