Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- George Santayana

Best Quotes about Music

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

10.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

11.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

15.

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

George Bernard Shaw

16.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

17.

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

18.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

20.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

Sousa, John Philip

22.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

23.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

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

Dan Rather

25.

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

26.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

27.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

28.

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

29.

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

Addison, Joseph

30.

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

31.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

32.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

34.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

35.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

John Erskine

38.

[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

39.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

40.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

41.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

42.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

45.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

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.

Wood, Ron