Motivational Quotes

Music

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.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Davis, Miles

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

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

Ed Gardner

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

Carlyle, Thomas

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

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

Plato

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

10.

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

Billings, Josh

11.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

14.

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

Wordsworth, William

15.

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

16.

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

Gibbons, Billy

17.

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

Rattle, Simon

18.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

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

20.

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

George Bernard Shaw

21.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

22.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

Cocteau, Jean

24.

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.

25.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

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

Armstrong, Louis

27.

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

28.

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

29.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

30.

[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

31.

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

Auden, W. H.

32.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Pepys, Samuel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

40.

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

41.

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)

42.

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.

43.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

44.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

45.

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

Schnabel, Artur

46.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

47.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

48.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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

Wilson, Colin