Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

- Robert Fripp

Best Quotes about Music

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

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

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

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

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

Wilson, Colin

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

10.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

11.

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

Davis, Miles

12.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

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

14.

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

Pepys, Samuel

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

20.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

21.

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

Brown, James

22.

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

23.

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

Kin Hubbard

24.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

25.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

26.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

27.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

28.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

29.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

33.

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

34.

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

Gore, Tipper

35.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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.

42.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

43.

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

44.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

45.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

46.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

47.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

48.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

49.

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)

50.

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

Wordsworth, William