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

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

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

Woody Allen

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

J. K. Rowling

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Davis, Miles

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

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

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

Billings, Josh

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

Plato

10.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

11.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

12.

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

Aldous Huxley

13.

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

Gibbons, Billy

14.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

15.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

16.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

17.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

19.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

20.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

21.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

22.

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

Attali, Jacques

23.

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.

24.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

25.

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

26.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

27.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

29.

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

Lynn, Loretta

30.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

31.

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

32.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

33.

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

Schnabel, Artur

34.

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

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

37.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

38.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

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

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Sousa, John Philip

45.

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

46.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

49.

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

50.

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