Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

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

Wilson, Colin

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

[T]here's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

Chuck Sigars

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

10.

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

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.

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

13.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

14.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

15.

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

16.

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

Huxley, Aldous

17.

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

18.

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

Gore, Tipper

19.

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

Johnson, James Weldon

20.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

21.

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

22.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

24.

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)

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Brown, James

30.

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

Plato

31.

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

George Bernard Shaw

32.

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

33.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

34.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

35.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

36.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

37.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

38.

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

J. K. Rowling

39.

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

George Eliot

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

43.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

44.

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

Sousa, John Philip

45.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

47.

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

G. K. Chesterton

48.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

49.

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

50.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann