Motivational Quotes

Music

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

- Genet, Jean

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Aldous Huxley

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

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.

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

Szell, George

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

10.

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

Newman, Ernest

11.

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

12.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

13.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

Genet, Jean

21.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

22.

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

Zappa, Frank

23.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

24.

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

Armstrong, Louis

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.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

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

28.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

29.

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

Sousa, John Philip

30.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

31.

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

John Erskine

32.

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

33.

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

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

35.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

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.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

39.

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.

40.

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

George Bernard Shaw

41.

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

42.

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

Wilson, Colin

43.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

44.

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

Luther, Martin

45.

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

Ed Gardner

46.

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

47.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

49.

[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

50.

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.