Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Aldous Huxley

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

George Santayana

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

10.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

11.

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.

Stendhal, Henri B.

12.

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

13.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Gibbons, Billy

19.

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

Pierre Beaumarchais

20.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

21.

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.

22.

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind.

Lingerman, Hal A.

23.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

24.

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

25.

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

Schnabel, Artur

26.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

J. K. Rowling

32.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

34.

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

George Bernard Shaw

35.

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

George Eliot

36.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

47.

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

48.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

49.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

50.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor