Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Newman, Ernest

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

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

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

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

10.

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

George Eliot

11.

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

Wilson, Colin

12.

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

Lennon, John

13.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

14.

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

15.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

Tate, Jeffrey

16.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

19.

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.

20.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

21.

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

22.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

23.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

24.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

25.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

26.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

27.

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

Green, Benny

28.

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

29.

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

Plato

30.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Luther, Martin

33.

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

34.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

35.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

36.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

37.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

38.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Woody Allen

40.

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

Franklin, Aretha

41.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

42.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

43.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

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

Davis, Miles

45.

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

46.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

47.

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

Gibbons, Billy

48.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

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

J. K. Rowling

50.

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