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

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

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

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

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

Franklin, Aretha

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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

Ed Gardner

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

10.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

11.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

12.

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

13.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

14.

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

15.

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

16.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

Pavarotti, Luciano

17.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

19.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

20.

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

21.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

22.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

23.

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

Szell, George

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

27.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

28.

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

Ruskin, John

29.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

31.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

33.

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

34.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

Sousa, John Philip

36.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

37.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

38.

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

39.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

40.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

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

Armstrong, Louis

42.

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

Gibbons, Billy

43.

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

Plato

44.

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

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

Aldous Huxley

48.

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

49.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

50.

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

J. K. Rowling