Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Szell, George

Best Quotes about Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

Cocteau, Jean

11.

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

Franklin, Aretha

12.

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

13.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

19.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

20.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

21.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

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

Attali, Jacques

26.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

Dietz, Howard

28.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

29.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

30.

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

Gibbons, Billy

31.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

32.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

33.

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

34.

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)

35.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Ed Gardner

39.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

40.

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

41.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

42.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

43.

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

Davis, Miles

44.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.