Motivational Quotes

Music

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

- Cage, John

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Tate, Jeffrey

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Newman, Ernest

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

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

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

16.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

17.

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

Luther, Martin

18.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

19.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

22.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

Miller, Henry

24.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

25.

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

26.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

27.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

31.

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

Aldous Huxley

32.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

33.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

34.

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

George Santayana

35.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

36.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

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

John Erskine

39.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

40.

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

41.

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

Woody Allen

42.

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

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.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

45.

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

Zappa, Frank

46.

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

Gibbons, Billy

47.

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

48.

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

Schnabel, Artur

49.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

50.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard