Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

- Thomas, Lewis

Best Quotes about Music

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

Pepys, Samuel

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

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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

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

Wordsworth, William

10.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

11.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

12.

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

13.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

14.

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

15.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

16.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

17.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

18.

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

Newman, Ernest

19.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

20.

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

21.

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

Dietz, Howard

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

24.

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

25.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

26.

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

27.

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

Rattle, Simon

28.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

29.

[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

30.

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

George Bernard Shaw

31.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

32.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

33.

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

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

36.

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

William Shakespeare

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

40.

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

41.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

42.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

44.

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

45.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

46.

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

47.

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

Auden, W. H.

48.

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

Plato

49.

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

Davis, Miles

50.

Song is the heroics of speech.