Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Tate, Jeffrey

Best Quotes about Music

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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

Addison, Joseph

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

10.

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

John Erskine

11.

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

Brown, James

12.

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

Sousa, John Philip

13.

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

14.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

15.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

16.

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

17.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

22.

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

G. K. Chesterton

23.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

24.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

25.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

26.

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

27.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

28.

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

29.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

30.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

31.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

33.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Billings, Josh

37.

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

38.

[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

39.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

40.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

47.

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

48.

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

Wordsworth, William

49.

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

Dan Rather

50.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch