Motivational Quotes

Music

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

- Duffecy, James

Best Quotes about Music

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

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

Attali, Jacques

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

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

Gore, Tipper

10.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

11.

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

12.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

13.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

14.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

15.

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

16.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

17.

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

Sousa, John Philip

18.

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

Ed Gardner

19.

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

Franklin, Aretha

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

22.

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

Huxley, Aldous

23.

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.

24.

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

Brown, James

25.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

26.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

27.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

28.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

29.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

30.

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

Mencken, H. L.

31.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

32.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

33.

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)

34.

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

35.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

36.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

37.

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

38.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

39.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

41.

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

42.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

43.

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

Armstrong, Louis

44.

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

45.

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

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.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

48.

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

Zappa, Frank

49.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

50.

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