Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

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

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.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Addison, Joseph

10.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

11.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

14.

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

15.

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

16.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

17.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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)

19.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

23.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

26.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

27.

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

28.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

31.

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

George Eliot

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

Wordsworth, William

36.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

37.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

38.

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

Huneker, James G.

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

42.

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

43.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

48.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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.