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

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Schnabel, Artur

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

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Wordsworth, William

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

Miller, Henry

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

10.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

11.

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

12.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

13.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

14.

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

Ed Gardner

15.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

16.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

17.

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

18.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

19.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

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

Kin Hubbard

21.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

22.

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

23.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

24.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

25.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

26.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

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

31.

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

Davis, Miles

32.

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

J. K. Rowling

33.

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

Attali, Jacques

34.

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

Cocteau, Jean

35.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Franklin, Aretha

40.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

41.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

42.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

43.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

44.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

45.

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

George Eliot

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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

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.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric