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

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Kin Hubbard

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

10.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

11.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

12.

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)

13.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

14.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

15.

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

Armstrong, Louis

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

19.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

20.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

21.

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

22.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

23.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

27.

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

Dan Rather

28.

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

Wilson, Colin

29.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

30.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

31.

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.

32.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

33.

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

John Erskine

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

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

Brown, James

40.

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

Dietz, Howard

41.

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

Green, Benny

42.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

43.

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

44.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

45.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

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

Hugo, Victor

47.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

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.