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

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

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

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

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

Green, Benny

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

11.

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

Hugo, Victor

12.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

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

Schnabel, Artur

14.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

15.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

16.

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

17.

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

18.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

19.

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

Zappa, Frank

20.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

21.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

24.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

25.

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

Ed Gardner

26.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

27.

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

28.

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

Brown, James

29.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

30.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

37.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

38.

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

Gibbons, Billy

39.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

40.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

41.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

42.

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

Szell, George

43.

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

44.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

Oscar Wilde

47.

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

48.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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

Plutarch