Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

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

Oscar Wilde

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

Aldous Huxley

13.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

16.

Music and dancing (the more the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Herschel, Sir John

17.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

18.

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

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

19.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

Ruskin, John

21.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

22.

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

Plutarch

23.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

24.

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

Lynn, Loretta

25.

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

26.

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Jean Baptiste Montegut

27.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

28.

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

George Eliot

29.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

30.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Martin Luther

34.

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

35.

[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

36.

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

Miller, Henry

37.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

38.

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

39.

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)

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

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

Gibbons, Billy

42.

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

Attali, Jacques

43.

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

44.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

46.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

47.

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

John Erskine

48.

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

49.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

50.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas