Motivational Quotes

Music

My music is best understood by children and animals.

- Igor Stravinsky

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

John Erskine

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

Attali, Jacques

10.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

14.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

15.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

16.

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

17.

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

Rattle, Simon

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Oscar Wilde

22.

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

23.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

24.

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

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

27.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

29.

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

Ed Gardner

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.

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

Lennon, John

32.

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

Huxley, Aldous

33.

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

Huneker, James G.

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

37.

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

38.

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)

39.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

42.

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

George Santayana

43.

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

44.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

47.

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

48.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

49.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

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