Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Davis, Miles

Best Quotes about Music

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Armstrong, Louis

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

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

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

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

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

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

10.

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

Sousa, John Philip

11.

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

John Erskine

12.

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

Gibbons, Billy

13.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

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

Oscar Wilde

15.

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

Dan Rather

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Ed Gardner

19.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

20.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

21.

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

22.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

23.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

24.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

25.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

26.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

27.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

Miller, Henry

36.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

37.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

38.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

39.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

42.

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

43.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

45.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

46.

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

47.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

48.

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

49.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

50.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren