Motivational Quotes

Music

You are the music while the music lasts.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Music

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

Ruskin, John

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)

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

14.

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

15.

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

Hugo, Victor

16.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

17.

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

18.

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

Ed Gardner

19.

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

Brown, James

20.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

25.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

26.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

27.

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

28.

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

George Santayana

29.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

33.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

34.

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

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

37.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

38.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

39.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

40.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

41.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

Martin Luther

43.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Brown, James

47.

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

Attali, Jacques

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.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

50.

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

Aldous Huxley