Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

- Martin Luther

Best Quotes about Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

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

Dietz, Howard

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

10.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

11.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

12.

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

George Santayana

13.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

14.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

15.

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

16.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

17.

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

Pepys, Samuel

18.

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

19.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

J. K. Rowling

24.

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.

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

29.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

34.

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

35.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

36.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

38.

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

39.

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

George Bernard Shaw

40.

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

Newman, Ernest

41.

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

Cocteau, Jean

42.

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

Addison, Joseph

43.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

44.

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

45.

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

Luther, Martin

46.

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

47.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

48.

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