If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
Charles IvesIf 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.
Charles IvesThe word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you
Charles IvesMost of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.
Charles IvesAn apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . 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
Charles IvesIn some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. 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
Charles Ives