Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Dietz, Howard

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

Mencken, H. L.

[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

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

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

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

Dan Rather

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Lennon, John

10.

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

Wilson, Colin

11.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

12.

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

13.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

14.

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

15.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

Huneker, James G.

19.

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

20.

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

Martin Luther

21.

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

22.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

23.

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

Auden, W. H.

24.

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

Plato

25.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

26.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

28.

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

29.

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

G. K. Chesterton

30.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

31.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

32.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

33.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

34.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

36.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

37.

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

38.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

40.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

Miller, Henry

43.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

47.

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

48.

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

Winter, Arthur

49.

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

Franklin, Aretha

50.

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