Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Dan Rather

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

Plato

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

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

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

Addison, Joseph

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

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.

10.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

11.

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

George Eliot

12.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

14.

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

15.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

16.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

17.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

18.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

19.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

20.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

21.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

22.

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

23.

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

Woody Allen

24.

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

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

27.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

30.

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

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

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

33.

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

Dietz, Howard

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

37.

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

Attali, Jacques

38.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

39.

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

40.

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

G. K. Chesterton

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

George Santayana

43.

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

44.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

46.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

47.

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

Armstrong, Louis

48.

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

49.

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

Wilson, Colin

50.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin