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
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. – 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
Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music. – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart