Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

Best Quotes about Music

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

Plato

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

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.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

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

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

10.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

11.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

13.

[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

14.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

15.

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

16.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

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

18.

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

Dietz, Howard

19.

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

Wilson, Colin

20.

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

21.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

22.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

23.

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

Zappa, Frank

24.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

25.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

29.

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

Rattle, Simon

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.

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

Armstrong, Louis

32.

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

33.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

34.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

35.

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

36.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

37.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

38.

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

39.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

40.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

41.

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

42.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

43.

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.

44.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

48.

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

49.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

50.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye