Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotations

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.