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

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

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

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

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

Schnabel, Artur

10.

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

Davis, Miles

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

14.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Plutarch

18.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

19.

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

Aldous Huxley

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 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

22.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

23.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

24.

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

George Bernard Shaw

25.

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

George Santayana

26.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

27.

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

28.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

29.

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

30.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

31.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

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

Luther, Martin

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Attali, Jacques

37.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

38.

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

39.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

40.

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)

41.

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

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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.

44.

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

Szell, George

45.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.