Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

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

Plato

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

Addison, Joseph

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

10.

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

Ed Gardner

11.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

12.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

13.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

14.

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

15.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

16.

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

17.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

18.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

19.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Attali, Jacques

23.

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

Newman, Ernest

24.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

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

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

32.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

35.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

36.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

37.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

38.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

39.

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

40.

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

Dietz, Howard

41.

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

Winter, Arthur

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.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

Oscar Wilde

45.

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

Sousa, John Philip

46.

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

47.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

48.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

49.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

50.

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

John Erskine