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

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

William Shakespeare

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

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Dietz, Howard

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

13.

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

Dan Rather

14.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

15.

[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

16.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

17.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Newman, Ernest

19.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

20.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

21.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

22.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

23.

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

24.

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

Cocteau, Jean

25.

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

Plato

26.

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

Addison, Joseph

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

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

Kin Hubbard

29.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

30.

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

31.

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

Rattle, Simon

32.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

33.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

34.

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

Plutarch

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

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)

37.

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

38.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Brown, James

42.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

48.

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

49.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

50.

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