Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Best Quotes about Music

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

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

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

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

George Santayana

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

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

10.

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

Aldous Huxley

11.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

13.

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

Wordsworth, William

14.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

15.

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

Plutarch

16.

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

17.

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

Schnabel, Artur

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Addison, Joseph

23.

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

Dan Rather

24.

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

25.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

27.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

28.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

29.

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

Szell, George

30.

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

31.

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

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.

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

Newman, Ernest

34.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

35.

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

G. K. Chesterton

36.

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

J. K. Rowling

37.

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

38.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

39.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

40.

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

41.

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

42.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

43.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

44.

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

45.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

47.

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

48.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

49.

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

50.

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