Motivational Quotes

Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

- Cooke, Alistair

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

George Santayana

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

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

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

10.

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

11.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

12.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

G. K. Chesterton

14.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

15.

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

John Erskine

16.

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

Winter, Arthur

17.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

18.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

19.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

20.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

21.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

28.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

29.

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

30.

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

31.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

32.

[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

33.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

34.

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

Brown, James

35.

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

Huxley, Aldous

36.

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

Plato

37.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

38.

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

Martin Luther

39.

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

40.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

41.

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

Lynn, Loretta

42.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

43.

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

Davis, Miles

44.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

46.

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.

47.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Wilson, Colin