Motivational Quotes

Music

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

- Packard, Vance

Best Quotes about Music

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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 only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Dan Rather

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

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

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

George Eliot

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

Hugo, Victor

10.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

Wilson, Colin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

19.

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

Huxley, Aldous

20.

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

Gore, Tipper

21.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

22.

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

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

John Erskine

26.

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.

27.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

28.

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

G. K. Chesterton

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

J. K. Rowling

32.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

33.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

35.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

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

Szell, George

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

42.

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

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

44.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

45.

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

Wordsworth, William

46.

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

47.

[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

48.

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

49.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

50.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De