Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- John Erskine

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

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

Zappa, Frank

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

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

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

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

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

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

George Eliot

10.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Armstrong, Louis

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

15.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

16.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

17.

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.

18.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Dan Rather

19.

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

20.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

21.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

22.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

23.

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

24.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

25.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

27.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Ruskin, John

28.

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

Franklin, Aretha

29.

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)

30.

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

31.

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

Gore, Tipper

32.

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

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

34.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Music hath the charm to soothe a savage beast, but I'd try a revolver first.

Billings, Josh

38.

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

Dietz, Howard

39.

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

40.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

41.

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

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

43.

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

44.

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

Szell, George

45.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

47.

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