Motivational Quotes

Music

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

- Dietz, Howard

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Lennon, John

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

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

Attali, Jacques

10.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

11.

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

Plutarch

12.

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

Huneker, James G.

13.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

14.

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

15.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

16.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

17.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

18.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

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

Plato

20.

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

J. K. Rowling

21.

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

Szell, George

22.

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

Hugo, Victor

23.

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

24.

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

George Bernard Shaw

25.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

26.

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

27.

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

John Erskine

28.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

29.

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

30.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

31.

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

Sousa, John Philip

32.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

33.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

34.

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

Lynn, Loretta

35.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

36.

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.

37.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

38.

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

39.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

40.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

41.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

42.

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

43.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

44.

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

45.

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

Aldous Huxley

46.

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

47.

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

Brown, James

48.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.