Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Music

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

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

Plutarch

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Zappa, Frank

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

Attali, Jacques

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

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

Gore, Tipper

10.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

18.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

24.

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

Szell, George

25.

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

26.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

27.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

28.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

29.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

30.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

31.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

32.

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

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

34.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

35.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

36.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

41.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

42.

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

43.

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

Armstrong, Louis

44.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

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.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

47.

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

Plato

48.

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.

49.

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

Schnabel, Artur

50.

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