Motivational Quotes

Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

- Cooke, Alistair

Best Quotes about Music

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

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

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

Addison, Joseph

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

Martin Luther

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

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

Ed Gardner

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

11.

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

Dan Rather

12.

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

13.

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

14.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

16.

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

Huxley, Aldous

17.

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

Davis, Miles

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.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

20.

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

J. K. Rowling

21.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

23.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

24.

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

25.

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

Zappa, Frank

26.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

27.

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

Plato

28.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

29.

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

Aldous Huxley

30.

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

31.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

32.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

33.

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

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

37.

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

38.

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

Green, Benny

39.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

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