Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

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

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

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Plato

13.

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

14.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

15.

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

16.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

17.

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

18.

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

Green, Benny

19.

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

Plutarch

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Lynn, Loretta

23.

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.

24.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

When griping grief the heart doth wound, and doleful dumps the mind opresses, then music, with her silver sound, with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare

29.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

30.

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

31.

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

Dietz, Howard

32.

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

Gibbons, Billy

33.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

34.

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

Szell, George

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

38.

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

Luther, Martin

39.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

Armstrong, Louis

44.

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

Aldous Huxley

45.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

46.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

Brown, James

48.

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

49.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

50.

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