Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

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

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

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

Kin Hubbard

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dan Rather

12.

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

Szell, George

13.

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

14.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

15.

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.

16.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

18.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

19.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

20.

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

Gibbons, Billy

21.

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

22.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

24.

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

Billings, Josh

25.

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

26.

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

27.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

28.

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

29.

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

Rattle, Simon

30.

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

Plutarch

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

34.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

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

37.

Cage, John

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

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

42.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

43.

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.

44.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

45.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.