Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Armstrong, Louis

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

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

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

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

10.

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

11.

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

Rattle, Simon

12.

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

13.

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

14.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

15.

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

Attali, Jacques

16.

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

Szell, George

17.

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

Plato

18.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Wood, Ron

19.

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

20.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

21.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

22.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

24.

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

Newman, Ernest

25.

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

John Erskine

26.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

27.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Hoffer, Eric

28.

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

George Santayana

29.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

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

31.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

Gibbons, Billy

32.

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

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

George Bernard Shaw

36.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

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.

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

39.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

40.

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

Martin Luther

41.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

42.

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

43.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

44.

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

45.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

46.

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

47.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

49.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

50.

Song is the heroics of speech.