Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Music

To know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of a man after his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare

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.

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

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

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

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

13.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

14.

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

15.

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

Rattle, Simon

16.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

17.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Green, Benny

18.

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

Winter, Arthur

19.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

23.

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it's part of growing up in the Western world.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

25.

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

26.

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

Brown, James

27.

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

28.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

29.

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

Plato

30.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

35.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Lutoslawski, Witold

36.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

37.

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

Martin Luther

38.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

39.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

40.

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

41.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

42.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

43.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

44.

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

Szell, George

45.

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

46.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

47.

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

48.

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

Hugo, Victor

49.

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.