Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

Best Quotes about Music

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

Aldous Huxley

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

George Bernard Shaw

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

10.

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

Franklin, Aretha

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Dan Rather

14.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

15.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

16.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

17.

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

Kin Hubbard

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

21.

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

22.

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

Plato

23.

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

Armstrong, Louis

24.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

25.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

26.

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

27.

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

Green, Benny

28.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Schnabel, Artur

31.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

32.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

33.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

34.

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

Wilson, Colin

35.

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

J. K. Rowling

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

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

Miller, Henry

38.

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

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

44.

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

45.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

46.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

47.

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

Hugo, Victor

48.

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

49.

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

Mencken, H. L.

50.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John