Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Woody Allen

Best Quotes about Music

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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.

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

Davis, Miles

10.

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

Gibbons, Billy

11.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

12.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

13.

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

14.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

16.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

17.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

21.

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

22.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

23.

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

Dan Rather

24.

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

25.

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

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

Kin Hubbard

27.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

28.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

29.

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

Huxley, Aldous

30.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

31.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

32.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

35.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Addison, Joseph

39.

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

40.

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

Hugo, Victor

41.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

42.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

43.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

50.

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.