Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Rattle, Simon

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Miller, Henry

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

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

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

10.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

J. K. Rowling

12.

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

13.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

17.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

22.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

23.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

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

Martin Luther

27.

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

28.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

29.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

30.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

31.

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

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.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

34.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

35.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

37.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

38.

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

39.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

40.

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)

41.

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

Winter, Arthur

42.

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

43.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

44.

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

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.

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.

47.

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

Brown, James

48.

Levi-Strauss, Claude