Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Wilson, Colin

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Lennon, John

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Ruskin, John

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

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

Dan Rather

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dietz, Howard

12.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

13.

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

14.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

17.

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

Pepys, Samuel

18.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

19.

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

20.

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

Rattle, Simon

21.

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

22.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

23.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

24.

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

25.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

26.

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

Martin Luther

27.

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

Wilson, Colin

28.

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

Oscar Wilde

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.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

31.

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

Winter, Arthur

32.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

33.

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

34.

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

35.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

36.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

37.

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

38.

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

Armstrong, Louis

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

45.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

46.

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

Addison, Joseph

47.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

48.

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

49.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

50.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas