Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Music

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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.

10.

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

Brown, James

11.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

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.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

15.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

16.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

17.

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

George Santayana

18.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Armstrong, Louis

22.

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

Green, Benny

23.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

24.

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

Cocteau, Jean

25.

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

John Erskine

26.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

29.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

31.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

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

Wilson, Colin

38.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Gibbons, Billy

43.

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