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

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Martin Luther

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Johnson, James Weldon

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

Brown, James

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

10.

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.

11.

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

Franklin, Aretha

12.

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

Dietz, Howard

13.

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

14.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

15.

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

16.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

17.

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

John Erskine

18.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

19.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

20.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

24.

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

Davis, Miles

25.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

26.

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

Plato

27.

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

28.

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

Ruskin, John

29.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

31.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

32.

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

33.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

34.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Wordsworth, William

40.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

41.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

42.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

44.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

45.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

46.

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

47.

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

Kin Hubbard

48.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

49.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

50.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest