Quotes from Charles Ives

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

Music is one of the ways that God has of beating in on man.

I don't write music for sissy ears.

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.

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

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?

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

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.

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

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

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

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

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.

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.

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

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

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

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

It will probably be centuries, at least generations, before man will discover all or even most of the value in a quarter-tone extension. And when he does, nature has plenty of other things up her sleeve.