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

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

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

Gibbons, Billy

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

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

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

12.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

13.

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

Ed Gardner

14.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

15.

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

16.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

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

Mencken, H. L.

19.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

20.

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

George Bernard Shaw

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Davis, Miles

24.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

25.

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

Oscar Wilde

26.

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

27.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

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

Plato

29.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

30.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

31.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

32.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

33.

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

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

38.

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

39.

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

George Santayana

40.

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

41.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

42.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

43.

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

44.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

45.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

46.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Aldous Huxley

48.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.