Motivational Quotes

Music

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

Best Quotes about Music

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

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

Gibbons, Billy

You are the music while the music lasts.

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Lynn, Loretta

10.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

14.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Mascagni, Pietro

15.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

19.

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

Billings, Josh

20.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

21.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

22.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

23.

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

Gore, Tipper

24.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

25.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

26.

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

Dan Rather

27.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

28.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

29.

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

30.

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!

William Shakespeare

31.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

32.

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Lutoslawski, Witold

34.

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

35.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

36.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

37.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

38.

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

Brown, James

39.

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

40.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

41.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

42.

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

Brown, James

43.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

44.

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

Ed Gardner

45.

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

46.

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

47.

[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

48.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

49.

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

50.

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