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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

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

Rattle, Simon

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

10.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

11.

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

12.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

13.

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

Johnson, Samuel

14.

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

Gibbons, Billy

15.

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

16.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

17.

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

18.

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

Aldous Huxley

19.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

20.

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

21.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

22.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

23.

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

24.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

25.

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

26.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

29.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

30.

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

Schnabel, Artur

31.

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

32.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

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

36.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

38.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

40.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

George Eliot

42.

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

43.

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

Zappa, Frank

44.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

50.

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