Charles Ives Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees.

Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

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.

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

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.

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

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 with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, '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'

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.

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

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

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?

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 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?

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. 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

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . 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

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

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 to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

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?