27 Quotes by Ralph Vaughan Williams

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

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.

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.

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.