Quotes & Sayings About Beethoven

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony", Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it. — Brennan Manning

I grew up listening to Beethoven and old jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Anita O'Day. But those were, like, the only women I listened to - I hated women pop singers. — Sophie B. Hawkins

I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven. — George Bernard Shaw

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children. — Diane Ackerman

Kahn once said, The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it. — Robert Hughes

The real artist has no pride. Unfortunately he sees that his art has no limits. He feels obscurely how far he is from the goal.
While he is perhaps being admired by others, he mourns the fact that he has not yet reached the point to which his better genius, like a distant sun, ever beckons to him. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved. — Richard Wagner

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or ... to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Beethoven
his thoughts moving at
the speed of sound
transforming emotion into music
and for a moment
it was like joy
was a tangible thing
like you could touch it
like for the first time
we could watch love and
hate dance together
in a waltz of such precision and beauty
that we finally understood
the history wasn't important
to know the man
all we ever had to do was
listen. — Shane Koyczan

I'd like to hear your opinion on this piece of Beethoven. And remember, it is not Beethoven who is being examined here. — Paul Strathern

[...] That's Beethoven's fifth...
Da da da dum!
Heh heh. That's morse code, y'know.
Uh, morse code?
Hmm. It's morse code for the letter "v". — Alan Moore

Beethoven had a great look. It was very much about the drama of appearance. — Boy George

A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion. — Joyce Cary

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven. — Denis Dutton

In whatsoever manner it be, let me turn to God and become fruitful in good works. Nothing higher exists than to approach God more than other people and from that to extend His glory among humanity.I will place all my confidence in your eternal goodness, O God! My soul shall rejoice in Thee, immutable Being. Be my rock, my light, forever my trust. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane. — Frederick Lenz

Music is mediator between spiritual and sensual life. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

We are a global society, and one does not have to be from Germany to give a great performance of Beethoven. — Leonard Slatkin

We all make mistakes, but everyone makes different mistakes — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

No friend have I. I must live by myself alone; but I know well that God is nearer to me than others in my art, so I will walk fearlessly with Him. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Do you think I give a damn about your and your pathetic violin? — Ludwig Van Beethoven

In the Eroica and other pieces of his middle years, Beethoven hailed the enlightened leader, the benevolent despot, the military spirit. Now for him the military spirit is nothing but destruction. By the end of this section the bugles are raging, the drums roaring, the choir crying Dona pacem! in terror. Now we understand what Beethoven meant by "prayer for inner and outer peace." The inner peace is that of the spirit. The outer peace is in the world. The fear and trembling in the Missa solemnis is not the fear of losing salvation in eternity; it is the human, secular fear of violence and chaos. — Jan Swafford

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice. — Charles Bukowski

Music is the mediator between
the spiritual and the sensual life. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God. — Gioachino Rossini

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Art demands of us that we shall not stand still. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music comes to me more readily than words. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars ... Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit ... I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man. — Frederic Chopin

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, - ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I had felt called upon to produce. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Life would be flat without music. It is the background to all I do. It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

No one can get reall drunk on a novle or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's night, Bartok's Sonata for two Pianos and percussion or the Beatles' White Album? He loved mozart as much as rock.
He considered music a liberating force, it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of hi body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends, He loved to dance an regretted that Sabina did not share his passion
pg 92-93 — Milan Kundera

My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach. — Frederick Lenz

Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized. — Jimmy Heath

Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human pssions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God - in human form. — John Eliot Gardiner

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Beethoven and Liszt have contributed to the advent of long hair. — Louis Moreau Gottschalk

The contemporary music of Tina Turner might make you feel powerful and energized. South African music provides a mind-boggling choice of styles from folk tunes to jive. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony has the magical ability to transport you to a country scene and trap you in a driving rain storm. — Jason Harvey

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement. — Tiffany Madison

I love a tree more than a man. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

He that divines the secret of my music is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

I haven't a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to the others of my art; I associate with Him without fear, I have always recognized and understood Him, and I have no fear for my music,-it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must become free from all the miseries that the others drag with them. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme. — Michael Tippett

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces. — Leonard Slatkin

There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski. — James R Newman

You accept food and music from every part of the world without reservation, don't you? You don't have to be Danish to eat Danish pastries or Italian to eat pasta and pizzas. You don't have to be a German to enjoy Beethoven or an Indian to listen to sitar music. Why then, when it comes to wisdom, do we become so narrow-minded? — Francois Gautier

We're dealing with music that is being played by traditional instruments in a specifically built building called a concert hall.
But classical is not - the reference is wrong, because classical on one hand refers to one period in musical history, which is Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, which is a fine period in musical history, but it was a while ago.On the other hand, it sort of alludes to some kind of "class," which A, is not true; B, is kind of detrimental to the whole idea. Because the point is that this music is available and it's actually relatively reasonably priced. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

A very long time ago, my brother and I played a game each morning while we waited for the school bus to arrive. We called the game Beethoven, and my sister refused to play because she thought it was inane. "Inane" is a word which here means that my brother and I would pretend we couldn't hear each other very well while we were talking. — Lemony Snicket

Frank Zappa ... was Beethoven for insane rock guys. — Scott Ian

There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before. — A.P. Herbert

Cope's bot can string together notes that weave in and out with the power of Beethoven or the finesse of Mozart. That a machine can produce things of such beauty is threatening to many in the music community. "If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers and along comes some twerp who claims to have this piece of software that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're asking yourself, 'What's happened here?'" Cope says. "I'm messing with some very powerful relationships. — Christopher Steiner

DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams. — David Halberstam

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times. — Smokey Robinson

Don't regard yourself as too divine to improve, occasionally, your own works. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition. — Brennan Manning

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because it will result in my being misunderstood. For me there can be no recreation in the company of others, no intelligent conversation, no exchange of information with peers; only the most pressing needs can make me venture into society. I am obliged to live like an outcast. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

I read once that certain musical compositions (by Bach? by Beethoven? I forget) sounded like the efforts of the human soul to explain itself to God. If ever I find my perfect combination of brown and lilac, I'll feel as though I've thus explained myself. — Gerald Murnane

True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original. — Ignacy Jan Paderewski

On behalf of all that is good and melodic, Ludwig van Beethoven, I apologize. — Sarah Strohmeyer

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill. — Franz Liszt

My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them. — James Brown

You've been listening to the adagio from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I think Ludwig pretty much summed up death in this one. You know, he had lost just about all his hearing when he wrote it, and I've often wondered if that didn't help him tune into the final silence of the great beyond. — Andrew Schneider

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece. — Lady Gaga

Men are not only together when they are with each other; even the distant and the dead live with us. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people. — Joshua Bell

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket) — Oscar Levant

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life - a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world? — Katha Pollitt

I want to seize fate by the throat. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury. — Franz Liszt

Music should be an elective experience. You should go, "I'm going to sit down and listen to some Beethoven, by God," and then you get to hear it. — Linda Ronstadt

Don't be too precious about your craft ... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will — David Foster

Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. — Albert Einstein

If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God ... — H.L. Mencken

If there's one thing I feel very strongly about, it's that there shouldn't be a distinction between pianists who play Ligeti and those who play Chopin. It might seem that they involve different skill sets, but I don't think that's true: whether playing Ives or Bach or Beethoven, you must bring the same imagination, the same sensitivity, and an ability to deal with same kinds of musical problems. The method behind my madness, anyway, is to keep plugging away at this idea. — Jeremy Denk

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later - yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering? — Ludwig Van Beethoven

All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen. — H.L. Mencken

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely. — Rebecca West

Then let us all do what is right, strive with all our might toward the unattainable, develop as fully as we can the gifts God has given us, and never stop learning — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Salieri was a pupil of Gluck. He was born in Italy in 1750 and died in Vienna in 1825. He left Italy when he was 16 and spent most of his life in Vienna. He's the key composer between classic music and romantic music. Beethoven was the beginning of romantic music, and he was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert. — Cecilia Bartoli

When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, Let's go. He's starting to develop. — Claude Debussy

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. — Daniel Barenboim

I think comedy has a range, with multiple peaks in different areas. It's like trying to compare Beethoven and the Beatles. Sometimes I hear from people, 'I think you try too hard in your comedy.' And that's what I worry about. — Bo Burnham

It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

I have a new nickname. A few of the guys have noticed that I am reading the bible on my free time. I am now 'preacher.' Not very fitting, if you ask me. Don't preachers have to stand up and teach people? I guess it could be worse. Some of the guys were talking about their favorite kind of music. Nobody said classical. I wasn't surprised, and I didn't volunteer my preference. Later on, I was talking to Tyler Young, and he asked me what I liked to listen to, so I told him about Beethoven. He asked me what songs I liked. I told him I especially liked Air on a G String - big mistake!! He thought I was talking about women's underwear. He's calling me 'G' now. I think I prefer Preacher. Tyler has a big mouth, especially when he thinks he's going to get laughs, and before I knew it, he'd told everyone about Air on a G String. Now I'm 'Preacher G. — Amy Harmon

Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well ... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven. — Irwin Shaw

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf... — William Gaddis

I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it? — Isaac Asimov

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.
(Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.)
[Said on his deathbed] — Ludwig Van Beethoven

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear. — John Ruskin

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. — Joseph Conrad

I wouldn't want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It's very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don't have the bass, it's like being amputated. It's like you have no legs. — Lou Reed