Motivational Quotes

Music

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

- Stravinsky, Igor

Best Quotes about Music

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Auden, W. H.

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

William Shakespeare

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

10.

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

Wordsworth, William

11.

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

Green, Benny

12.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

13.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

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.

16.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

17.

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

18.

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

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

Addison, Joseph

20.

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

21.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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

George Eliot

23.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

24.

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.

25.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

26.

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

27.

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

28.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

29.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

30.

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

31.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

32.

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

33.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

34.

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

Cocteau, Jean

35.

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.

36.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

37.

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

Huneker, James G.

38.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

39.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

40.

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

41.

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

Davis, Miles

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

45.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

46.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

47.

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

Schnabel, Artur

48.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

49.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido