Motivational Quotes

Music

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

- Aaron Copland

Best Quotes about Music

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

J. K. Rowling

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

G. K. Chesterton

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

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

Ruskin, John

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

10.

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

11.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

12.

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

13.

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

George Santayana

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

16.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

18.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

21.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

22.

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

23.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

24.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

25.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

27.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

28.

[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

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

33.

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

34.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

35.

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

John Erskine

36.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

37.

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

38.

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

Sousa, John Philip

39.

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

40.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

43.

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

Davis, Miles

44.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

46.

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

47.

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

Szell, George

48.

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

49.

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

Plutarch

50.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude