Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Music

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

Kin Hubbard

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

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

Brown, James

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

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

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)

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

George Eliot

13.

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

G. K. Chesterton

14.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

15.

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

Dietz, Howard

16.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

17.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

24.

[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

25.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

27.

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

Szell, George

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

30.

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

31.

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

Oscar Wilde

32.

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

33.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

34.

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

Auden, W. H.

35.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

36.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

37.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

38.

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

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

40.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

42.

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

Green, Benny

43.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

44.

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

Lennon, John

45.

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

Martin Luther

46.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

50.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham