Motivational Quotes

Music

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

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

Rattle, Simon

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

Carlyle, Thomas

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

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

Billings, Josh

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

Addison, Joseph

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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

John Erskine

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

Plato

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

15.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

16.

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

17.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

18.

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

Auden, W. H.

19.

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

Szell, George

20.

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

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

28.

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

Green, Benny

29.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

30.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

31.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

George Bernard Shaw

35.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

36.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

40.

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

Cocteau, Jean

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

45.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

46.

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

47.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

50.

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