Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Attali, Jacques

Best Quotes about Music

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

Szell, George

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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

Wordsworth, William

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

Gibbons, Billy

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

10.

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

Attali, Jacques

11.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

12.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

13.

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

George Bernard Shaw

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

25.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

26.

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.

27.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

31.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

33.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

34.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Ruskin, John

36.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

39.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

40.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

41.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

42.

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

G. K. Chesterton

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

48.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

49.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

50.

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

Billings, Josh