Charles Ives Quotes (17 Quotes)


    You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

    Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

    There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

    Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

    One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.


    If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

    It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

    The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

    The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.

    A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.


    In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

    But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

    Now if you look out of that window and enjoy the mountains, how can you possibly look out of this window and enjoy the ocean

    Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.

    In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones-when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now-perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized.

    If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.


    More Charles Ives Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Memory - Sadness - Experience - Music - Life - Truth - Heaven - Reality - Education - Necessity - Mind - Literature - Unity - Horse - Perfection - Art - Man - World - Inspirational - View All Charles Ives Quotations

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    Robert Schumann - Richard Wagner - Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonard Bernstein - Johannes Sebastian Bach - Giacomo Puccini - Franz Schubert - Carl Maria von Weber - Bela Bartok - Andrew Lloyd Webber


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