Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

Ruskin, John

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

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Auden, W. H.

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

Martin Luther

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

10.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

11.

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

12.

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

Dietz, Howard

13.

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

Gibbons, Billy

14.

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

15.

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

16.

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

Miller, Henry

17.

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

Ed Gardner

18.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

19.

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

Schnabel, Artur

20.

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

21.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

22.

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

23.

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

Gore, Tipper

24.

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

25.

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

Dan Rather

26.

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

Armstrong, Louis

27.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

28.

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

Huxley, Aldous

29.

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

30.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

31.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

32.

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

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

36.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

37.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George

38.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

39.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

40.

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

Kin Hubbard

41.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

42.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

44.

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

45.

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

46.

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

47.

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

Stendhal, Henri B.

48.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

49.

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