Motivational Quotes

Music

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

- Lutoslawski, Witold

Best Quotes about Music

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

10.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

11.

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

Green, Benny

12.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

Huneker, James G.

14.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

Luther, Martin

16.

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

Gibbons, Billy

17.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

18.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

21.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

22.

[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

23.

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

Aldous Huxley

24.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

25.

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

26.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

27.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

31.

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

Lennon, John

32.

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

33.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

34.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

36.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

40.

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

Brown, James

41.

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

John Erskine

42.

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

43.

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

Zappa, Frank

44.

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

Davis, Miles

45.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

46.

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

47.

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

Plato

48.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

49.

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

Brown, James

50.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!