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.

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Green, Benny

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

Huneker, James G.

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

Dietz, Howard

10.

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

11.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

12.

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

Billings, Josh

13.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

16.

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

17.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

18.

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

19.

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

Wilson, Colin

20.

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

Kin Hubbard

21.

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

John Erskine

22.

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

Rattle, Simon

23.

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

Wordsworth, William

24.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

25.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

26.

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)

27.

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

28.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

30.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Szell, George

34.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Plato

42.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

43.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

44.

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

45.

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

Schnabel, Artur

46.

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

47.

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

Cocteau, Jean

48.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

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

50.

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

Johnson, James Weldon