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

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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)

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

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

Aldous Huxley

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

10.

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

11.

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

Davis, Miles

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.

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

14.

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

Auden, W. H.

15.

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

16.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

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

John Erskine

18.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

21.

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

22.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

26.

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

Sousa, John Philip

27.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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.

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

30.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

31.

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

Brown, James

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.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

34.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

35.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

G. K. Chesterton

40.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

41.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

42.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

43.

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

Ruskin, John

44.

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

George Bernard Shaw

45.

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

46.

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

Kin Hubbard

47.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

48.

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

49.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

50.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance