Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

Best Quotes about Music

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

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

J. K. Rowling

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Davis, Miles

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

[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

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

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

Huneker, James G.

13.

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

14.

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

Hugo, Victor

15.

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

Miller, Henry

16.

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

Lennon, John

17.

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

18.

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

George Santayana

19.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

20.

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.

21.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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

Lynn, Loretta

24.

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

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.

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

27.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

29.

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

Gibbons, Billy

30.

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

31.

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

Winter, Arthur

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Armstrong, Louis

36.

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

37.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

38.

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

39.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

40.

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

41.

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

Green, Benny

42.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

46.

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

47.

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

Plato

48.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

49.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

50.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.