Motivational Quotes

Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

- George Bernard Shaw

Best Quotes about Music

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

Johnson, James Weldon

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

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

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

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

Ed Gardner

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

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

Woody Allen

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

10.

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

Cocteau, Jean

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

14.

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

Kin Hubbard

15.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

16.

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

Lennon, John

17.

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

18.

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

Wilson, Colin

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

22.

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.

23.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

24.

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

25.

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)

26.

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

John Erskine

27.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

[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

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

37.

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

Addison, Joseph

38.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

39.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

40.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

41.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

42.

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

George Bernard Shaw

43.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

44.

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