Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

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

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

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

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

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

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

Huneker, James G.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

10.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

11.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

15.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

16.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

17.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

18.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

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

Martin Luther

20.

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

21.

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

Cocteau, Jean

22.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

23.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

24.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

25.

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

Attali, Jacques

26.

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

John Erskine

27.

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

George Eliot

28.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

29.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

30.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

31.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

32.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

35.

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

36.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

37.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

38.

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

G. K. Chesterton

39.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

40.

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

Franklin, Aretha

41.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

42.

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

43.

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

Wilson, Colin

44.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

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

Sousa, John Philip

46.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

Aldous Huxley

48.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

49.

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

50.

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

Winter, Arthur