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 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

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

Plato

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

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

Lennon, John

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

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

John Erskine

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

10.

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

11.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

12.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

13.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

14.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

15.

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

Pepys, Samuel

16.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

Auden, W. H.

18.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

19.

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

20.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

21.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

22.

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

23.

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)

24.

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

25.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

26.

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

27.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

30.

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

31.

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

Lynn, Loretta

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

34.

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

35.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

36.

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

Newman, Ernest

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

40.

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

41.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

42.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

43.

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

44.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

45.

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

46.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

47.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.