Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Beethoven, Ludwig Van

Best Quotes about Music

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

Luther, Martin

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)

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

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

Sousa, John Philip

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

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

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

10.

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

Rattle, Simon

11.

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

12.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Huxley, Aldous

14.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes --ah, that is where the art resides.

Schnabel, Artur

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Newman, Ernest

18.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Zappa, Frank

20.

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

G. K. Chesterton

21.

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

J. K. Rowling

22.

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Green, Benny

24.

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

25.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

26.

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

27.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday, and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Taylor, James

28.

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

Pavarotti, Luciano

29.

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

John Erskine

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

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

37.

People compose for many reasons: to become immortal; because the pianoforte happens to be open; because they want to become a millionaire; because of the praise of friends; because they have looked into a pair of beautiful eyes; for no reason whatsoever.

Schumann, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

41.

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

42.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

43.

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

Kin Hubbard

44.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

45.

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

46.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

47.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

Franklin, Aretha

49.

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