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
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
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
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. – Edmund Burke