28 Quotes by Charles E. Ives

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.

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

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

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.

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.

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.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

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.