Motivational Quotes

Music

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)

Best Quotes about Music

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Thoreau, Henry David

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

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

John Erskine

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

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

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

10.

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

Huxley, Aldous

11.

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

12.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

13.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

14.

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

15.

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

George Eliot

16.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

17.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

18.

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

19.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

21.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

22.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

24.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

25.

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

26.

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

Dan Rather

27.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

28.

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.

29.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

30.

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

Gibbons, Billy

31.

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

32.

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

Plutarch

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.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

35.

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

Addison, Joseph

36.

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

37.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

38.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

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

41.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

47.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.