Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Pierre Beaumarchais

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

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.

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

George Santayana

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

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.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

10.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

12.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

13.

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

Billings, Josh

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

17.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

21.

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

George Bernard Shaw

22.

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

Plato

23.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

24.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

25.

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

26.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

30.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

33.

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

Gore, Tipper

34.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

35.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

36.

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

J. K. Rowling

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

41.

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

42.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

44.

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

45.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

46.

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

47.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

G. K. Chesterton