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

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

Lynn, Loretta

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

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

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Cocteau, Jean

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Davis, Miles

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

William Shakespeare

10.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

Kin Hubbard

20.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

21.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

22.

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

23.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

24.

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

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

27.

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

Rattle, Simon

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

Dietz, Howard

30.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

31.

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

32.

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

Plato

33.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

34.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

35.

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

Plutarch

36.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Huxley, Aldous

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

42.

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

Szell, George

43.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

44.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

45.

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

46.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

47.

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

48.

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

Addison, Joseph

49.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.