Quotes from Ralph Vaughan Williams

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

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

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

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.

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

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.

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.