Motivational Quotes

Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Tolstoy, Count Leo

Best Quotes about Music

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

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

Lennon, John

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

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

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

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

Brown, James

10.

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

Huneker, James G.

11.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

12.

I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated.

Brown, James

13.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

14.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

15.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

16.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

17.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

18.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

23.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

24.

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

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

29.

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

30.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

31.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

38.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

39.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

Szell, George

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Miller, Henry

44.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

45.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

46.

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