Motivational Quotes

Music

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Music

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

Miller, Henry

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

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

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

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

Lynn, Loretta

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

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

Wilson, Colin

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

10.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Coward, Noel

11.

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

Proverb, Zimbabwe

12.

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

Wordsworth, William

13.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

14.

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

15.

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

Gibbons, Billy

16.

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

J. K. Rowling

17.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

Newman, Ernest

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

23.

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

Sousa, John Philip

24.

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

25.

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

Sir Thomas Beecham

26.

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

Huneker, James G.

27.

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

Woody Allen

28.

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

29.

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

Aldous Huxley

30.

[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

31.

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

Plutarch

32.

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

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

33.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

34.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

35.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

36.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

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.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

Luther, Martin

40.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

41.

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

42.

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

Schnabel, Artur

43.

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.

44.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

Edgar Wilson Nye

45.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs