Motivational Quotes

Music

The history of a people is found in its songs.

- Jellinek, George

Best Quotes about Music

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

Martin Luther

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

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

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

10.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

11.

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

Armstrong, Louis

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

15.

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

16.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Beerbohm, Sir Max

17.

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

18.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

19.

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

20.

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

Brown, James

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

Music and woman I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Pepys, Samuel

26.

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

Attali, Jacques

27.

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

28.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

29.

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

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.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

32.

Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their plagiarism.

Dietz, Howard

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

36.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Lennon, John

37.

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

38.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

40.

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

41.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

42.

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

Franklin, Aretha

43.

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

44.

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

Gibbons, Billy

45.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

46.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

47.

Good music is very close to primitive language.