Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Sir Thomas Beecham

Best Quotes about Music

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

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

Beerbohm, Sir Max

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

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

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

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Plutarch

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

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

10.

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

11.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

12.

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

Dan Rather

13.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

14.

If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.

William Shakespeare

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.

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

17.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

18.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

19.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Dietz, Howard

24.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

27.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

28.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

29.

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

Huneker, James G.

30.

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

Tate, Jeffrey

31.

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

32.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

33.

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

Lynn, Loretta

34.

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

Zappa, Frank

35.

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

36.

[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

37.

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

38.

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

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Good music is very close to primitive language.

Diderot, Denis

40.

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

Armstrong, Louis

41.

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

Attali, Jacques

42.

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

43.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

49.

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

50.

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

Aldous Huxley