Motivational Quotes

Music

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Music

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

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

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

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

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

Brown, James

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

10.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

11.

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

12.

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

Szell, George

13.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

Plutarch

15.

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

J. K. Rowling

16.

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

17.

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

18.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

20.

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

George Santayana

21.

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

22.

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

23.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

30.

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

Lynn, Loretta

31.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

33.

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)

34.

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

Hugo, Victor

35.

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

36.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

37.

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