Motivational Quotes

Music

I hate music, especially when it's played.

- Jimmy Durante

Best Quotes about Music

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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

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

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

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

Davis, Miles

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

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Pepys, Samuel

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

15.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

19.

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

20.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

21.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

22.

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

23.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

25.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

27.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

28.

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)

29.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

30.

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.

31.

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

Szell, George

32.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

33.

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

Wordsworth, William

34.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

35.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

36.

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

37.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

38.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

39.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

40.

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

41.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

42.

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

Martin Luther

43.

[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

44.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

45.

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

Gore, Tipper

46.

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

Lynn, Loretta

47.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

48.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

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

50.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill