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

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

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

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

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

Davis, Miles

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

13.

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.

14.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

15.

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

16.

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

G. K. Chesterton

17.

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

18.

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)

19.

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

Johnson, Samuel

20.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

George Bernard Shaw

23.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

24.

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

Brown, James

25.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Woody Allen

29.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

30.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

33.

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

Plato

34.

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

Zappa, Frank

35.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

36.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

37.

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

38.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

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.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

41.

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

John Erskine

42.

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

Newman, Ernest

43.

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

Ruskin, John

44.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

45.

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

Armstrong, Louis

46.

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

47.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

50.

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.