Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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

J. K. Rowling

10.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

11.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

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.

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

14.

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

Huxley, Aldous

15.

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

Martin Luther

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Gibbons, Billy

20.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

21.

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

Gore, Tipper

22.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

23.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

24.

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

Brown, James

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

27.

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

Pepys, Samuel

28.

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

29.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

30.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

31.

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

32.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

34.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

35.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

36.

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

Plutarch

37.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

39.

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

Wilson, Colin

40.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

41.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

42.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

43.

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

Ed Gardner

44.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

45.

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

46.

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

Winter, Arthur

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel