Motivational Quotes

Music

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.

Best Quotes about Music

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

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Ruskin, John

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Green, Benny

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

10.

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

11.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

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

13.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Wilson, Colin

18.

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

Rattle, Simon

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

23.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

24.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

25.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

26.

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

Huxley, Aldous

27.

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

28.

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

Szell, George

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Wordsworth, William

34.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

39.

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

40.

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

Kin Hubbard

41.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

42.

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

45.

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

46.

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

Davis, Miles

47.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

48.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

49.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

50.

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)