Charles Ives Quotes

31 quotes in 407 categories

• It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
• Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?
• 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…
• 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
• An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in…
• 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…
• The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized
• 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,…
• If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up…
• Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used…
• I don't write music for sissy ears.
• My God! What has sound got to do with music?
• Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.
• All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded-the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make…
• A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains…
• Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
• 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…
• Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's.
• You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
• Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

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