Motivational Quotes

Music

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

- Holly, Buddy

Best Quotes about Music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Addison, Joseph

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

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.

11.

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

John Erskine

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

14.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

21.

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

Zappa, Frank

22.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

23.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

24.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

25.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

28.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Szell, George

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

32.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

33.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

34.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

35.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

38.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

42.

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

Wilson, Colin

43.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

44.

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

45.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

50.

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