Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Tate, Jeffrey

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Dietz, Howard

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

10.

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.

11.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

12.

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

George Bernard Shaw

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

15.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

20.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

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

Wilson, Colin

22.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

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.

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

Huxley, Aldous

28.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

29.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

30.

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

31.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

33.

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

Plutarch

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

39.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

43.

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

Gibbons, Billy

44.

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

45.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

46.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

John Erskine

48.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

49.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

50.

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