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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

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

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

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

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

10.

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

Sousa, John Philip

11.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

12.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

17.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

21.

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

22.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

23.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

24.

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

George Santayana

25.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

26.

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

Auden, W. H.

27.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

28.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

29.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

30.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

31.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

Rattle, Simon

34.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

35.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Kin Hubbard

37.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

38.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

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.

41.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

50.

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

Huneker, James G.