Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Martin Luther

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Franklin, Aretha

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

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

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

11.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

12.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

13.

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

14.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

15.

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

16.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Dietz, Howard

18.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

19.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

20.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

21.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

22.

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

J. K. Rowling

23.

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

Plutarch

24.

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

25.

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

Brown, James

26.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

27.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

28.

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

Gore, Tipper

29.

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

George Eliot

30.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

35.

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

36.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

37.

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

38.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

39.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

Schnabel, Artur

42.

[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

43.

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

44.

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

Addison, Joseph

45.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

49.

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

Wordsworth, William

50.

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