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

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

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

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.

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

Szell, George

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Auden, W. H.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

13.

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

14.

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

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

Pepys, Samuel

16.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

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.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

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

Plato

20.

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

21.

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

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.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

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.

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

Ed Gardner

26.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

27.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

28.

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

29.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

30.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

31.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

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

33.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

34.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

35.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

36.

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.

Carey, Mariah

37.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

38.

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

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

Armstrong, Louis

41.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

Addison, Joseph

46.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

50.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van