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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

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.

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)

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

10.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

11.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

12.

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

13.

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

Pepys, Samuel

14.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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

Wilson, Colin

17.

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

18.

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

Oscar Wilde

19.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

20.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

22.

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

Aldous Huxley

23.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

George Bernard Shaw

26.

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

27.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Lennon, John

30.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

31.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

32.

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

33.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

34.

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

35.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

36.

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

37.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

38.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

George Santayana

44.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

45.

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

46.

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

Addison, Joseph

47.

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

48.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

50.

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