Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Wilson, Colin

Best Quotes about Music

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Armstrong, Louis

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

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

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

Szell, George

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

Ruskin, John

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

10.

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

Lynn, Loretta

11.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

12.

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

Miller, Henry

13.

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

Attali, Jacques

14.

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

Luther, Martin

15.

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

Dan Rather

16.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

17.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

18.

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

19.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

20.

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

21.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

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

23.

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

24.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

27.

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

28.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

29.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

30.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

Franklin, Aretha

32.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

33.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

34.

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

Martin Luther

35.

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

Brown, James

36.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

38.

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

Gibbons, Billy

39.

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

Kin Hubbard

40.

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

41.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

42.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

43.

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

44.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

45.

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

Schnabel, Artur

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Oscar Wilde

50.

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.