Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

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

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

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

Plato

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

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

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

10.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

11.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

12.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

13.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

14.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

15.

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

16.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

17.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

18.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

19.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

20.

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

21.

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

Huneker, James G.

22.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

23.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

Aldous Huxley

26.

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

Gore, Tipper

27.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

28.

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

29.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

30.

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.

31.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

32.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

33.

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

George Santayana

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

37.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Kin Hubbard

41.

My music is best understood by children and animals.