Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

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

Oscar Wilde

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

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.

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

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

13.

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

Aldous Huxley

14.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

15.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

John Erskine

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Szell, George

20.

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

21.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

22.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

23.

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

24.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

25.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

27.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

28.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

29.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

30.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

31.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

32.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

33.

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

34.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

35.

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

36.

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

Ed Gardner

37.

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

38.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

39.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

40.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hugo, Victor

44.

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

Wilson, Colin

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.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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

Mencken, H. L.

49.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

50.

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

Sousa, John Philip