Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Plutarch

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

13.

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

14.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

15.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

16.

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

17.

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

J. K. Rowling

18.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

19.

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

Addison, Joseph

20.

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

21.

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

Gibbons, Billy

22.

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

23.

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

Woody Allen

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

26.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

27.

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

Wordsworth, William

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

Lennon, John

34.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

35.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

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

Winter, Arthur

37.

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

Luther, Martin

38.

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

39.

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

Szell, George

40.

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

41.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

42.

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

Auden, W. H.

43.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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