Motivational Quotes

Music

Music should never be harmless.

- Robertson, Robbie

Best Quotes about Music

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

Luther, Martin

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

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

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

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

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Huxley, Aldous

10.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

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

14.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil

15.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

16.

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

Ed Gardner

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Dietz, Howard

21.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

22.

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

23.

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

Franklin, Aretha

24.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

25.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

26.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

27.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

28.

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

29.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

30.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

31.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

32.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

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

Plato

35.

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

36.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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)

43.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

44.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

45.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

46.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

47.

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

George Eliot

48.

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

49.

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

50.

[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