Motivational Quotes

Music

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

- Holly, Buddy

Best Quotes about Music

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Schnabel, Artur

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

10.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

11.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

13.

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

14.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

15.

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

16.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

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

18.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

19.

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

Sousa, John Philip

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 is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

22.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

23.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

Attali, Jacques

29.

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

30.

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

George Santayana

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Oscar Wilde

35.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

36.

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

37.

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

Wilson, Colin

38.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Ed Gardner

44.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

45.

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

John Erskine

46.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

49.

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

50.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars