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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

13.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

14.

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

15.

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

Davis, Miles

16.

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

17.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

18.

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

J. K. Rowling

19.

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

John Erskine

20.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

21.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

22.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

23.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

24.

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

Oscar Wilde

25.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

29.

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

Aldous Huxley

30.

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

Plutarch

31.

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

32.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

36.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

37.

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

38.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

39.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

40.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

41.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

46.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

47.

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

48.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.