27 Quotes by Ralph Vaughan Williams

I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.

No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

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

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.