Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

John Erskine

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

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

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

10.

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

Wordsworth, William

11.

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

Dan Rather

12.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

Gibbons, Billy

14.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

15.

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

16.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

20.

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

Martin Luther

21.

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

Ruskin, John

22.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

23.

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

Rattle, Simon

24.

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

George Bernard Shaw

25.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

26.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

27.

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

28.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

30.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Davis, Miles

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

34.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Brown, James

38.

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

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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.

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

Plutarch

42.

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

43.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

44.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

45.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

47.

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

48.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

49.

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

50.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell