Motivational Quotes

Music

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

- Giles, Henry

Best Quotes about Music

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)

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

[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

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

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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

Woody Allen

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.

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

13.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

Huxley, Aldous

16.

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

17.

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

Szell, George

18.

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

Davis, Miles

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Brown, James

22.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

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

Lennon, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

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

33.

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

Huneker, James G.

34.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

35.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

36.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

38.

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

Luther, Martin

39.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

40.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

41.

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.

42.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

43.

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

44.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

45.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

46.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

47.

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