Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Music

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

Dan Rather

10.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

11.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

12.

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

13.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

18.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

19.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

20.

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

Davis, Miles

21.

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

Szell, George

22.

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.

23.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

24.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

25.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

26.

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

Rattle, Simon

27.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Martin Luther

29.

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

Wilson, Colin

30.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

33.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

36.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

38.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Pepys, Samuel

42.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

43.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

44.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

45.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

46.

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

47.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

48.

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.

49.

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

Oscar Wilde

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon