Motivational Quotes

Music

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

- Stendhal, Henri B.

Best Quotes about Music

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Addison, Joseph

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

Dan Rather

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

Auden, W. H.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

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

Dietz, Howard

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

10.

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

Lennon, John

11.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

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

J. K. Rowling

14.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

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.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

18.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

19.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

20.

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

George Eliot

21.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

28.

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

29.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

30.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

31.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

32.

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

33.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

34.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

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

Zappa, Frank

36.

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

Ed Gardner

37.

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

38.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

Rattle, Simon

40.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

41.

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

42.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Huxley, Aldous

49.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais