Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

Wilson, Colin

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

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

Luther, Martin

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

13.

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

14.

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

Schnabel, Artur

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

17.

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

Winter, Arthur

18.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

19.

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

George Eliot

20.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

21.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

22.

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

23.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

24.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

25.

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

Armstrong, Louis

26.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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

Woody Allen

30.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

31.

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

Plato

32.

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

Zappa, Frank

33.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

35.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

36.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

37.

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

Aldous Huxley

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

41.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

George Santayana

45.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

46.

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

J. K. Rowling

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

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