Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Szell, George

Best Quotes about Music

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

G. K. Chesterton

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Woody Allen

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

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

Huneker, James G.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

10.

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

11.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

12.

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

13.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

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.

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

17.

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

18.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

21.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Carlyle, Thomas

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

25.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

26.

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

Ed Gardner

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.

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

29.

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

Dietz, Howard

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

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

Plato

32.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

33.

Music expresses that which can not be said and on which it is impossible to be silent

Hugo, Victor

34.

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

35.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

37.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

38.

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

39.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Attali, Jacques

42.

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

Brown, James

43.

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

Szell, George

44.

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

Schnabel, Artur

45.

Song is the heroics of speech.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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

50.

[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