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

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

Davis, Miles

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

Ed Gardner

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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.

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

10.

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

John Erskine

11.

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

12.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

13.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

14.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

16.

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

Luther, Martin

17.

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

Brown, James

18.

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

Wordsworth, William

19.

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.

20.

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

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.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

23.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

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

George Santayana

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

Aldous Huxley

31.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Szell, George

35.

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

Lennon, John

36.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

37.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

38.

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

Green, Benny

39.

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

Dietz, Howard

40.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

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

43.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

46.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

47.

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

48.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

49.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

50.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch