Motivational Quotes

Music

Song is the heroics of speech.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

10.

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

11.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

12.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

13.

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

14.

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

Newman, Ernest

15.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

16.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

17.

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

18.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

19.

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

John Erskine

20.

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

21.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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.

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.

24.

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

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

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.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

28.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

29.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

30.

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

31.

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

Luther, Martin

32.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Zappa, Frank

36.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

37.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Sir Edward Appleton

39.

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

40.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

41.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

42.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

43.

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

44.

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

45.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

46.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

47.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

48.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

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

50.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James