Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

Best Quotes about Music

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

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

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Szell, George

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

Huxley, Aldous

10.

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

Pepys, Samuel

11.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

12.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

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

George Santayana

14.

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

Martin Luther

15.

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

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

19.

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

Aldous Huxley

20.

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

Zappa, Frank

21.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

24.

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

25.

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

Dan Rather

26.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

27.

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

28.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

29.

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

30.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

31.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

33.

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

34.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

35.

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

36.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

41.

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

Hugo, Victor

42.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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.

47.

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

Lynn, Loretta

48.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

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

50.

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