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? – Charles Ives
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 days unity. – Charles Ives
You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance. – Charles Ives
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
Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world. – Arthur Helps, “Chapter IV,” Companions of My Solitude, 1851