Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Huneker, James G.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Brown, James

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

12.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

14.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

15.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

16.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

[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

19.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

24.

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

25.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

26.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

30.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

31.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

32.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

33.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

34.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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.

37.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

38.

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

Ed Gardner

39.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

40.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

41.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

42.

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

Huneker, James G.

43.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

47.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Lynn, Loretta