Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Duffecy, James

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.

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

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

10.

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

G. K. Chesterton

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.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

13.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

14.

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

J. K. Rowling

15.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Plato

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Schnabel, Artur

23.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

24.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

[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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

30.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Lynn, Loretta

34.

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

Gore, Tipper

35.

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

36.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

37.

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

38.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

39.

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.

40.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

41.

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

Brown, James

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

47.

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

48.

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

Sousa, John Philip

49.

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

50.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore