Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

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

Tate, Jeffrey

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.

10.

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

Davis, Miles

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

William Shakespeare

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

16.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

17.

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

18.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Martin Luther

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

27.

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

Lynn, Loretta

28.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

29.

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

30.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

31.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

32.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

33.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

34.

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.

35.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

36.

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

Hugo, Victor

37.

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

Wordsworth, William

38.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

39.

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

Plato

40.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

41.

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

Dietz, Howard

42.

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

43.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

44.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

45.

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

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

Wilson, Colin

49.

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

50.

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