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

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

Huxley, Aldous

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

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

John Erskine

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

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

12.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

15.

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

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

18.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

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

20.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

21.

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

22.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

23.

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

24.

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

Martin Luther

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Ed Gardner

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

31.

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

George Santayana

32.

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

George Bernard Shaw

33.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

34.

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

35.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

36.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

41.

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

Wilson, Colin

42.

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

43.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

44.

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

45.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

46.

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

Plato

47.

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

48.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

49.

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

G. K. Chesterton

50.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James