Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

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)

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

10.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

11.

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

Miller, Henry

12.

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

13.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

14.

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

15.

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

George Santayana

16.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

17.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

18.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

22.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

23.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

24.

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

25.

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

Huneker, James G.

26.

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

27.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

28.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

29.

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

Rattle, Simon

30.

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

Szell, George

31.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

32.

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

Lynn, Loretta

33.

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

Davis, Miles

34.

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

35.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

Aldous Huxley

38.

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

Cocteau, Jean

39.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

40.

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

41.

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

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

48.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

50.

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