Unmusical Quotes & Sayings

Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge ... — Josef Albers

There is no place in the service of worship where vanity and bad taste can so intrude as in the singing. There is, first, the improvised second part which one hears almost everywhere. It attempts to give the necessary background, the missing fullness to the soaring unison tone, and thus kills both the words and the tone. There is the bass or the alto who must call everybody's attention to his astonishing range and therefore sings every hymn an octave lower. There is the solo voice that goes swaggering, swelling, blaring and tremulant from a full chest and drowns out everything else to the glory of its own fine organ. There are the less dangerous foes of congregational singing, the 'unmusical' who cannot sing, of whom there are far fewer than we are led to believe, and finally, there are often those also who because of some mood will not join in the singing and thus disturb the fellowship. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Umpires got power, man. You ever notice if you go to a ballpark and there's a close play on first base, they will not run the replay at the ballpark? I've seen umpires go underneath and call up and say if you run one more of those replays, we're gonna forfeit the game. That's how strong their union is. — Pete Rose

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument. — Don DeLillo

Maybe I fear things going wrong so much that I pre-empt them by not getting excited about them when they appear to be. going well. — Jack Dee

As a quartet, they struck an unmusical note, primarily the fault of Ybarra-Jaega, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band. — Truman Capote

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. — Christopher Hitchens

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck
passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question? — John Cage

Though unmusical, German is the most expressive of all languages, — Arthur Conan Doyle

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough ... — Ralph Vaughan Williams

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season. — Aristotle.

The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy, we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise. — Gian Carlo Menotti

In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter's image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. — Eleanor Catton

This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another. — David Levithan

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? — Henry David Thoreau

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had. — Barry Hannah

Thus the Government of our Virtue was broken and I exchang'd the Place of Friend for that unmusical harsh-sounding Title of Whore. — Daniel Defoe

The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music. — William F. Buckley Jr.

But reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum. None of the individual metal hunks of an airplane have the property of flight, but when they are attached together in the right way, the result takes to the air. A thin metal bar won't do you much good if you're trying to control a jaguar, but several of them in parallel have the property of containment. The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts. — David Eagleman

Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I tried retiring a couple of times and it just didn't really stick so, but at some point enough things conspire together and it does stick. — Bode Miller

There are so many great stories and characters out there that you can just keep saying, "Yes," but you've got to eventually make the decision that if it's something you really want then do it for yourself. — Channing Tatum

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar. — Roger Zelazny

Musical talent is maybe something, but there are no unmusical people. You're moved by music. It's total rubbish to say, "Oh, I'm unmusical." It doesn't exist; it's ridiculous. — Igor Levit

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess. — Alfred Austin

His lessons were chock-full of analogies for a variety of musical situations. Those little things were my favorites. 'No ... that's too much vibrato. It's like putting bright red lipstick on a beautiful woman.' I always thought it was funny that when you broke a musical rule-like accenting a weak beat-he would turn his head away from you sharply, almost as though he were in pain. It's like you just slapped him in the face by being unmusical. — Manny Laureano

There is no such thing as an unmusical person. — Hans Werner Henze

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Youth has its romance, and maturity its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, noon and summer their power, night and winter their repose. Each attribute is good in its own season. — Charlotte Bronte

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity. — John Boyle O'Reilly

The reason so many of us lose our bearings about practising early in life is that we practice in living rooms with other family members in earshot - and healthy practice would simply sound too obnoxious, intrusive, repetitious and unmusical for others to hear without annoyance. — William Westney

The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned. — Tom Wolfe