37 Quotes by Charles Ives

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.

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?

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.