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

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

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.

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

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

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

Addison, Joseph

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

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

Gibbons, Billy

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

10.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

11.

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

George Bernard Shaw

12.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

13.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

14.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

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.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

17.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

18.

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

19.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

20.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

21.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

22.

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

Hugo, Victor

23.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

24.

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

25.

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

Miller, Henry

26.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

31.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

32.

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

33.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Wilson, Colin

35.

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

Sousa, John Philip

36.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

37.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

38.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

39.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

43.

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

Attali, Jacques

44.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

45.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.