Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

G. K. Chesterton

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Szell, George

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

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

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

10.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

11.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

12.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

14.

[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

15.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

16.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

17.

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

18.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

19.

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

Huxley, Aldous

20.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

24.

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

Rattle, Simon

25.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

26.

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

George Bernard Shaw

27.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

28.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

29.

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

Aldous Huxley

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

George Santayana

34.

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

35.

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

Dietz, Howard

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

39.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

40.

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

Schnabel, Artur

41.

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

42.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

43.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Martin Luther

48.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

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

Davis, Miles

50.

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