Motivational Quotes

Music

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

- Zappa, Frank

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

G. K. Chesterton

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

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

10.

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

11.

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

Gore, Tipper

12.

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

Gibbons, Billy

13.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

17.

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

18.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

19.

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

20.

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

Huxley, Aldous

21.

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

22.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

23.

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

Ed Gardner

24.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

25.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

26.

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

Plutarch

27.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

28.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

29.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

30.

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

Attali, Jacques

31.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking,'Is there a meaning to music?'My answer would be,'Yes.'And'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?'My answer to that would be,'No.'

Aaron Copland

32.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

33.

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

Armstrong, Louis

34.

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

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

38.

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

J. K. Rowling

39.

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

Winter, Arthur

40.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

42.

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

Franklin, Aretha

43.

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

Woody Allen

44.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

45.

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

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

47.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

48.

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

49.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

50.

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