Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

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

10.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

11.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

12.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

13.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

14.

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

15.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

16.

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

17.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

19.

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

Woody Allen

20.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

21.

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

22.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

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

27.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

28.

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)

29.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Oscar Wilde

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

37.

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.

38.

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

George Bernard Shaw

39.

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

Plutarch

40.

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

Attali, Jacques

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

Dan Rather

45.

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

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

47.

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

48.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

49.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

50.

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