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

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

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

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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

Plutarch

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

Lynn, Loretta

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

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

Szell, George

10.

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

Sousa, John Philip

11.

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

Wilson, Colin

12.

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

13.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

14.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

15.

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

16.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

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

18.

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

Ruskin, John

19.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

23.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

26.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

Plato

28.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

29.

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

Aldous Huxley

30.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

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.

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

34.

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

35.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

36.

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

J. K. Rowling

37.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

38.

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

Brown, James

39.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

40.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

41.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

42.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

43.

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

John Erskine

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

George Santayana

47.

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

48.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

49.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

50.

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