Charles Ives Quotes

In ‘thinking up’ music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized

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

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.

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of ‘God’ may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.

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.

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

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.

My God! What has sound got to do with music?

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.

I don’t write music for sissy ears.

A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?

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.

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.

It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have — I want it that way.