Motivational Quotes

Music

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

- Duffecy, James

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Wordsworth, William

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

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

Dietz, Howard

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

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

Addison, Joseph

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

Lynn, Loretta

10.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

11.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

12.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

13.

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

Gibbons, Billy

14.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

Aldous Huxley

17.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

18.

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

19.

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

Auden, W. H.

20.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

21.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

22.

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

23.

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

G. K. Chesterton

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

26.

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

Green, Benny

27.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

28.

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.

29.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

31.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

32.

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

J. K. Rowling

33.

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

Dan Rather

34.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

35.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

36.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

37.

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

38.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

39.

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

Huneker, James G.

40.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

41.

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

Armstrong, Louis

42.

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

43.

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

44.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

45.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

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

50.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max