Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Woody Allen

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Luther, Martin

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

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

Winter, Arthur

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

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

10.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

13.

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

14.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

15.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

20.

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

Sousa, John Philip

21.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

22.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

24.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Wordsworth, William

34.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

35.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

36.

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

G. K. Chesterton

37.

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

38.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

39.

[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

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

43.

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

44.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

45.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

46.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

47.

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

48.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

49.

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

Huneker, James G.

50.

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

Lynn, Loretta