Motivational Quotes

Music

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

- Keats, John

Best Quotes about Music

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

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

Green, Benny

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

10.

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

11.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

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

13.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

14.

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

15.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

16.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

17.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

18.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

19.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

20.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

21.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Rattle, Simon

26.

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.

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Oscar Wilde

30.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

31.

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

George Santayana

32.

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

33.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

35.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

36.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

37.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

38.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

45.

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

46.

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

Pepys, Samuel

47.

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

48.

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

49.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

50.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John