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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

[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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Carlyle, Thomas

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

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

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

Szell, George

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

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

12.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

13.

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

Gore, Tipper

14.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

16.

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

17.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

18.

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

19.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

23.

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

24.

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

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.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

28.

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

29.

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

Dietz, Howard

30.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

31.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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

33.

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

Plutarch

34.

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

35.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

36.

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

Wordsworth, William

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

41.

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

Huxley, Aldous

42.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

43.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

44.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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.

46.

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

Attali, Jacques

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

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

Miller, Henry

49.

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

50.

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