Motivational Quotes

Music

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

- Lennon, John

Best Quotes about Music

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

J. K. Rowling

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

16.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

17.

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

18.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

19.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

20.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

21.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

23.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

26.

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

27.

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

Wilson, Colin

28.

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

Gibbons, Billy

29.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

31.

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

Woody Allen

32.

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

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

35.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

36.

[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

37.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

38.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

G. K. Chesterton

40.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

41.

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

Davis, Miles

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

44.

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

45.

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

John Erskine

46.

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.

47.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

48.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.