Charles Ives Quotes

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

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

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

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

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

I don't write music for sissy ears.

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.

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.

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 that are not there, who shall stop it?

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

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

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

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

Everyone should have the opportunity of not being over-influenced.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's.

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

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

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.

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.