Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Tate, Jeffrey

Best Quotes about Music

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

Wordsworth, William

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

Rattle, Simon

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

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

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

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

Oscar Wilde

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

10.

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

Davis, Miles

11.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

12.

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

13.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

J. K. Rowling

16.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

17.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

21.

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

22.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

23.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

24.

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

Szell, George

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Schnabel, Artur

27.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

28.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

29.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Gibbons, Billy

33.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Sousa, John Philip

34.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

35.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

36.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

37.

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

38.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

43.

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

Green, Benny

44.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

45.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

48.

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

George Eliot

49.

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

50.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.