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

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

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.

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

G. K. Chesterton

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

15.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

20.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

21.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

22.

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

23.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

25.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

26.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

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

Szell, George

29.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

30.

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

Lennon, John

31.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

32.

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

33.

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

34.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

35.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

36.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

38.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

41.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

42.

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

43.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

44.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

Woody Allen

46.

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

Wordsworth, William

47.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

48.

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)

49.

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

50.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp