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

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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

Sousa, John Philip

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.

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

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

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

J. K. Rowling

10.

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

11.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

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

George Bernard Shaw

13.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

16.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

17.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

18.

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

19.

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

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

21.

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

Billings, Josh

22.

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

23.

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

G. K. Chesterton

24.

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

25.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

26.

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

Newman, Ernest

27.

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

28.

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

Dan Rather

29.

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

Ruskin, John

30.

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

Brown, James

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Rattle, Simon

33.

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

Davis, Miles

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

36.

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

Winter, Arthur

37.

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

38.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

39.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

42.

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

43.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

44.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

46.

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

Armstrong, Louis

47.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

48.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

[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

50.

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