Motivational Quotes

Music

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

- Edgar Wilson Nye

Best Quotes about Music

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

Sousa, John Philip

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

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

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

Oscar Wilde

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

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

Attali, Jacques

10.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

11.

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

Lennon, John

12.

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

Wilson, Colin

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

15.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

16.

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

17.

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

Ed Gardner

18.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Green, Benny

22.

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

23.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

24.

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

Addison, Joseph

25.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

26.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

27.

[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

28.

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

Martin Luther

29.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

30.

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

Newman, Ernest

31.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

32.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

35.

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

Brown, James

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Ruskin, John

39.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

John Erskine

42.

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

43.

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

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.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

48.

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

Luther, Martin

49.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

50.

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

Lynn, Loretta