Motivational Quotes

Music

Song is the heroics of speech.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Zappa, Frank

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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

Brown, James

10.

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

11.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

12.

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

13.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

14.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

Dan Rather

16.

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

George Santayana

17.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

19.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

George Eliot

21.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

22.

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

Kin Hubbard

23.

[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

24.

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

John Erskine

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

29.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

30.

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

Wordsworth, William

31.

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

Woody Allen

32.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

33.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

34.

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

35.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

36.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

37.

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

38.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

43.

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

George Bernard Shaw

44.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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.

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

47.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

48.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

49.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

50.

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.