Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Music

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

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

Huneker, James G.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

10.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

11.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

12.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

13.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

14.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

15.

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

George Santayana

16.

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

Addison, Joseph

17.

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

18.

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

Billings, Josh

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

Zappa, Frank

23.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

26.

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

27.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

28.

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

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

33.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

34.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

35.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

36.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

37.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

38.

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

Brown, James

39.

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

40.

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

George Bernard Shaw

41.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

46.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

47.

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.