Charles Ives quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Ives

Charles Ives Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Charles Ives on Wise Famous Quotes.

My God! What has sound got to do with music?

It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.

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

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

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

I don't write music for sissy ears.

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have
I want it that way.

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

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

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

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

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.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

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

Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

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.

Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man.

Most of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.