Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

[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

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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.

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.

11.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

12.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

13.

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

14.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

15.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

16.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

17.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

18.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

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

20.

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)

21.

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.

22.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

23.

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

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

26.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

27.

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

Gibbons, Billy

28.

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

Oscar Wilde

29.

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

30.

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

George Eliot

31.

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

Attali, Jacques

32.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

36.

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

37.

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

Dan Rather

38.

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

Pepys, Samuel

39.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

40.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

42.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

43.

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

Kin Hubbard

44.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

45.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

49.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

50.

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