Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

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

Davis, Miles

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

Attali, Jacques

11.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

12.

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

Kin Hubbard

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

19.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

20.

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)

21.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

22.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

23.

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

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

28.

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

29.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

34.

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

Newman, Ernest

35.

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

Szell, George

36.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

37.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

38.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

39.

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

40.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

41.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

42.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

43.

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

44.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

47.

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

Schnabel, Artur

48.

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

Addison, Joseph

49.

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

50.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy