Motivational Quotes

Music

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

- Wordsworth, William

Best Quotes about Music

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

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

10.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

11.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Lynn, Loretta

13.

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

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

Brown, James

16.

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

Oscar Wilde

17.

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

Huxley, Aldous

18.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

19.

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.

20.

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

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Dan Rather

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Franklin, Aretha

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

30.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

31.

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

32.

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

Attali, Jacques

33.

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

34.

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

Sousa, John Philip

35.

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

Dietz, Howard

36.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Addison, Joseph

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

43.

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

Gibbons, Billy

44.

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

Gore, Tipper

45.

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

Szell, George

46.

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

47.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

48.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

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