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

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

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

Dan Rather

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

George Santayana

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

10.

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.

11.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

12.

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

John Erskine

13.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

14.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

15.

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

Hugo, Victor

16.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

17.

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

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

20.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

22.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

24.

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

Aldous Huxley

25.

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

26.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

27.

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

28.

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

Armstrong, Louis

29.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

30.

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

31.

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

Pepys, Samuel

32.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

33.

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

34.

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

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.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

38.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

39.

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

40.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.