Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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)

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

Wilson, Colin

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

Green, Benny

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

10.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

15.

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

Dan Rather

16.

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

Aldous Huxley

17.

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

George Bernard Shaw

18.

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

George Eliot

19.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

20.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

21.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

28.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

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

Auden, W. H.

31.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

34.

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

Gore, Tipper

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

Attali, Jacques

39.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

40.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

41.

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

Szell, George

42.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

43.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

44.

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

45.

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

46.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

47.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

48.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

49.

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

Armstrong, Louis

50.

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