Motivational Quotes

Music

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

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

Pepys, Samuel

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

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

Armstrong, Louis

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

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

10.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

11.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

12.

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

13.

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

Davis, Miles

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Green, Benny

17.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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)

19.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

20.

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

G. K. Chesterton

21.

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

Dan Rather

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

Aldous Huxley

25.

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

26.

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

Franklin, Aretha

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

John Erskine

31.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

35.

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

36.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

37.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

38.

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

39.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Ed Gardner

41.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

42.

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

Sousa, John Philip

43.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

44.

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

Wilson, Colin

45.

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.

46.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

47.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

48.

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

49.

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

Winter, Arthur

50.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan