Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

- Morrison, Van

Best Quotes about Music

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

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

Wordsworth, William

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

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

11.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

12.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

13.

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

Brown, James

14.

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

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

17.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

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

Gibbons, Billy

19.

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

G. K. Chesterton

20.

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

Wilson, Colin

21.

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

Hugo, Victor

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

24.

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

Ruskin, John

25.

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

Aldous Huxley

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

31.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

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.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

36.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

40.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

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

43.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

44.

[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

45.

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

46.

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

Attali, Jacques

47.

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

48.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

49.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

50.

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