Motivational Quotes

Music

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

- Lennon, John

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Ed Gardner

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

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

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

George Santayana

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

Aldous Huxley

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

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

10.

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

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.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

13.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

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

G. K. Chesterton

15.

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

Woody Allen

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Billings, Josh

20.

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.

21.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

24.

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

Schnabel, Artur

25.

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

26.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

27.

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)

28.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

29.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

30.

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

Armstrong, Louis

31.

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

32.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

33.

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

34.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson

35.

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

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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.

37.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

38.

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

Rattle, Simon

39.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

40.

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

41.

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

Oscar Wilde

42.

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

Winter, Arthur

43.

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

Plato

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

47.

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

Sousa, John Philip

48.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

49.

The high note is not the only thing.