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

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Dan Rather

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Winter, Arthur

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

Ed Gardner

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

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

10.

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

11.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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

Plato

13.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

14.

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

15.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

16.

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

17.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

19.

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

20.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

21.

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

Johnson, Samuel

22.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

23.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

24.

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

25.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

26.

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

27.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

28.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

29.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

33.

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

34.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

35.

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

36.

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

Wilson, Colin

37.

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

38.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

40.

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

Green, Benny

41.

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)

42.

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

Davis, Miles

43.

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

George Santayana

44.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

45.

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

Kin Hubbard

46.

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

47.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

48.

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