Motivational Quotes

Music

[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

Best Quotes about Music

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

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

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

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.

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

Brown, James

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

10.

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

11.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

12.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Addison, Joseph

16.

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

17.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

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

19.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

20.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

23.

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

Gibbons, Billy

24.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

25.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

26.

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

27.

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

Miller, Henry

28.

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

29.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

30.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

31.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

32.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

38.

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

Aldous Huxley

39.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

40.

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)

41.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

42.

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

43.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

44.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

45.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

46.

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.