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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

Sousa, John Philip

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

Billings, Josh

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

Huneker, James G.

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

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

Wilson, Colin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

15.

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

16.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

17.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

19.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

20.

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

21.

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

Winter, Arthur

22.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

23.

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

24.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

25.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

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

Dietz, Howard

28.

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

Addison, Joseph

29.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

30.

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

Franklin, Aretha

31.

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

32.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

33.

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

Green, Benny

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

36.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

37.

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

G. K. Chesterton

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

42.

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

George Eliot

43.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

44.

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

45.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

46.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

47.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

48.

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