Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Music

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

[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

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

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

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

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

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Newman, Ernest

12.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

13.

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

14.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

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.

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

Szell, George

17.

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

Attali, Jacques

18.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

19.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

20.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

21.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

22.

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

Ed Gardner

23.

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

Davis, Miles

24.

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

John Erskine

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

28.

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

29.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

30.

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

31.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

32.

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)

33.

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

34.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

36.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

41.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

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

Sousa, John Philip

47.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

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

49.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

50.

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