Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

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

Plato

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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

Huxley, Aldous

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Plutarch

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

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

G. K. Chesterton

10.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

11.

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

12.

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

Szell, George

13.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

14.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

15.

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

Attali, Jacques

16.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

19.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

20.

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.

21.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

23.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

24.

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

Rattle, Simon

25.

[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

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.

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

28.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

29.

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

30.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

31.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

32.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

33.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

34.

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

Green, Benny

35.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

36.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

37.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

38.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

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.

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

45.

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

46.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

47.

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

48.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

49.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

50.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo