Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

William Shakespeare

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

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

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

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

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

Huxley, Aldous

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

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

10.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

11.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

12.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

13.

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

14.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

17.

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

18.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

19.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

20.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

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 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

26.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

31.

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

Dietz, Howard

32.

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

J. K. Rowling

33.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

34.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

35.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

36.

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

37.

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

Miller, Henry

38.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

Sir Thomas Beecham

39.

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

40.

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

41.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

42.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

43.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

44.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

45.

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.

46.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

47.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

48.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von