Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Luther, Martin

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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)

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Addison, Joseph

11.

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

G. K. Chesterton

12.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

15.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

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 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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

24.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

Hoffer, Eric

27.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

28.

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

Aldous Huxley

29.

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

30.

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

Zappa, Frank

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

36.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

37.

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

George Eliot

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

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

Rattle, Simon

42.

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

43.

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

Szell, George

44.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

45.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

46.

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

Ed Gardner

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.

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

Newman, Ernest

49.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

50.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare