Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Zappa, Frank

Best Quotes about Music

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

Dan Rather

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

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Ruskin, John

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

Attali, Jacques

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

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

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

Wilson, Colin

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

10.

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

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

15.

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

Brown, James

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Schnabel, Artur

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

22.

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.

23.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

24.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

25.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

26.

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

27.

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

Plato

28.

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

29.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

30.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

31.

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

32.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

33.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

34.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

35.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

36.

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

G. K. Chesterton

37.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

38.

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

39.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

40.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

41.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

42.

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