Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- John Erskine

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

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

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

10.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

11.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

13.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

J. K. Rowling

18.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Lennon, John

22.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

23.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

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

Dan Rather

25.

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

26.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

27.

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

28.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

31.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

32.

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.

33.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

34.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

35.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

36.

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

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

42.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

43.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

Szell, George

45.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

46.

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

Brown, James

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

50.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel