Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Plato

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

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

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

Green, Benny

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

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

Szell, George

10.

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

11.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

12.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Winter, Arthur

14.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

Huxley, Aldous

17.

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

18.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

20.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

21.

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

22.

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

Woody Allen

23.

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

24.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

25.

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

26.

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

Wordsworth, William

27.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

30.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

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.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

Dan Rather

34.

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

Gore, Tipper

35.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

36.

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.

37.

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

Wilson, Colin

38.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

39.

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

40.

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

41.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

42.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

43.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

44.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Johnson, Samuel

50.

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

Franklin, Aretha