Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Wordsworth, William

Best Quotes about Music

Rock 'n Roll is an asylum for emotional idiots.

Neville, Richard

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

Sousa, John Philip

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

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

Wordsworth, William

Music is only love looking for words.

Durrell, Lawrence

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

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

Brown, James

11.

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

12.

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

Armstrong, Louis

13.

Music is the key to the female heart.

Seume, Johann G.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

17.

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

John Erskine

18.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of culture.

Cage, John

19.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

20.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

21.

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

Dietz, Howard

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

24.

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

G. K. Chesterton

25.

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

Attali, Jacques

26.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

30.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

31.

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

Plutarch

32.

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

Grant, Ulysses S.

33.

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

34.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

35.

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

36.

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

Gore, Tipper

37.

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

38.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

45.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

46.

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

47.

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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