Top 100 Beethoven's Quotes
#1. Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh's starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven's Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.
Daniel Bor
#2. And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
Tony Randall
#3. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Kurt Vonnegut
#4. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.
Rachel Miner
#5. With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
#6. Beethoven's symphonies are not 'relaxing.' They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.
Joshua Bell
#7. Anybody can build a building, putting some doors into it, but how many times have you been in a building that moves you to tears the way Beethoven's 'Eighth' does?
Philip Johnson
#8. I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names ... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.
Alan Bradley
#9. One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#10. 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
#11. Right on time, sugar." Josh draped his arm around her shoulders and steered her through the lobby. "Traffic okay?"
"Yeah, except when that alien spaceship landed on I-90 and then all those crickets jumped out to perform Beethoven's Fifth on kazoos. Otherwise, clear sailing.
Jamie Farrell
#12. One of Beethoven's favorite dishes was macaroni and cheese. The girl I marry must be able to make good macaroni and cheese ... "
"How did Beethoven feel about cold cereal?
Charles M. Schulz
#13. 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
#14. Yesterday I was playing Beethoven's fifth, because I love that.
Joan Armatrading
#15. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
E. M. Forster
#16. The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.
David Finckel
#17. Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams
#18. I cried for it. That's how I see life too. I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.
Jack Kerouac
#19. Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then.
David Letterman
#20. It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.
Daniel Barenboim
#21. We live in a world of excess: too many kinds of coffee, too many magazines, too many types of bread, too many digital recordings of Beethoven's Ninth, too many choices of rearview mirrors on the latest Renault. Sometimes you say to yourself: It's too much, it's all too much.
Corinne Maier
#23. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
Simon Rattle
#24. Beethoven concertos ... Tchaicovsky concertos ... with a lot of these wonderful masterpieces there's always something wonderful to find ... there's always something new to find ...
Itzhak Perlman
#25. I have owned and played a Steinway all my life. It's the best Beethoven piano. The best Chopin piano. And the best Ray Charles piano. I like it, too.
Randy Newman
#26. 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
#27. Beethoven wrote in three flats a lot. That's because he moved twice.
Victor Borge
#28. One of my dogs is in the movie Beethoven's 2nd.
Greg Louganis
#29. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
Henry Miller
#30. If some of those people who wanted to ban Beethoven's music could hear the music that's being played today, wow, what would they do, man?
Smokey Robinson
#31. My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#32. Music is the electric soil in which the spirit thinks, lives and invents. All that's electrical stimulates the mind to flowing surging musical creation. I am electrical by nature.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#33. To follow in Beethoven's footsteps transcends one's strength.
Johannes Brahms
#34. All my life I have regarded myself as one of Mozart's greatest admirers, and I will remain one until my last breath.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#35. 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
#36. There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice?that Beethoven came with music in his soul, Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib.You're born with it.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#37. There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand - good heavens! - that's what I really call troublesome.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#38. 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
#39. Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful.
If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful.
If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
Paul Erdos
#40. 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
#41. My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.
Harry Connick Jr.
#42. For me, listening to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in particular, there's an emotional aspect - very different kinds of emotional aspects from those two composers, nonetheless, very strong emotional aspects from both of those composers.
Crispin Glover
#43. If you think beauty insipid, you haven't experienced it. Nor is it always devoid of suffering. That's something religious artists have always understood, Michelangelo, Chagall, and Van Gogh, Beethoven, C.S. Lewis, and all the writer's for whom beauty is a gift and a calling.
Kristen Heitzmann
#44. I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
A.R. Rahman
#45. When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.
Joshua Bell
#46. Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA's push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we're carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#47. I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. Oh, well
he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.
Walt Disney Company
#49. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.
Haruki Murakami
#50. The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
Kurt Vonnegut
#51. Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.
Thomas Beecham
#52. You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."
Eric Weiner
#54. Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
#55. 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
#56. Beethoven's fourth and seventh symphonies have a certain amount in common. Well, of course they're both written by Beethoven, but besides that, I would say their overall effect and idea is to provide the listener with an incredible sense of joy.
Joshua Bell
#57. 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
#58. In these few minutes, I was Beethoven's captive and I couldn't have been a more willing participant.
Stormy Smith
#59. Beethoven said that it's better to hit the wrong note confidently, than hit the right note unconfidently. Never be afraid to be wrong or to embarrass yourself; we are all students in this life, and there is always something more to learn.
Mike Norton
#60. 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
#61. Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Berg imply a type of pianist who is intellectual. That's not always associated with female soloists.
Jeffrey Tate
#62. I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!
Charles Hazlewood
#63. [...] 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
#64. I'm trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It's fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.
Evan Peters
#65. 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
#66. You can't sing Beethoven from the neck up --- you'll bleed! Beethoven is not precious. He's prodigal as hell. He tramples all over nicety. He's ugly, heroic; he roars, he lusts after beauty, he rages after nobility. Be ye not temperate!
Robert Shaw
#67. 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
#68. The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.
Joseph Joachim
#69. The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#71. She's sweet on Wagner.
I think she'd die for Beethoven.
she loves the way Puccini lays down a tune,
and Verdi's always creeping from her room.
Electric Light Orchestra
#72. I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
Maximilian Schell
#73. Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal.
Chet Williamson
#74. I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd ... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.
Jonathan Meades
#75. Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
Daniel Barenboim
#76. In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
Daniel Barenboim
#77. Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.
Karen Armstrong
#78. It is my belief one should not belittle the artist; while, however glorious his fame may seem, his time on Mount Olympus as an honourable guest of Zeus is short. It's a pity, but all too eager will the common folk drag him from this etherial heights to the low and trodden earth.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#79. I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.
I.M. Pei
#80. For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
Cornel West
#81. 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
#82. For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.
Gustavo Dudamel
#83. 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
#84. Without suffering there is no struggle, without struggle no victory, without victory no crown." Maria van Beethoven (Beethoven's mom)
Jan Swafford
#85. What I have in my heart and soul - must find a way out. That's the reason for music.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#86. There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.
Nico Muhly
#87. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
Hugh MacLeod
#88. Reviewer: 'One of your themes was very similar to one of Beethoven's!' Brahms replied, 'Of course it is. Everyone steals - the important thing is to do it brilliantly.
Johannes Brahms
#89. I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.
Dave Smalley
#90. And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.
Victor Borge
#91. After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.
Zubin Mehta
#92. At that moment a solitary violin struck up. But the music was not dance music; it was more like a song - a solemn, sweet song. (I know now that it was Beethoven's Romance in F.) I listened, and suddenly it was as if the fog that surrounded me had been penetrated, as if I were being spoken to.
Jennifer Paynter
#93. Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
John Updike
#94. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
Slavoj Zizek
#95. When Milton met Beethoven he said 'I've been told that you cannot hear.' And that was true, but Beethoven read Milton's lips and understood so he nodded his head 'yes.' Unfortunately Milton was blind so he didn't see the head nod and patiently awaited a response until he starved.
Nate Denver
#96. I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
Colm Toibin
#97. As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.
Michael Hersch
#98. 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
#99. There are different people who got me into music, but what I liked about Beethoven is that even when I didn't understand it or it was too long, there's still something about it that drove me to it. Then it got me excited about actually learning music, like a theory of it.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#100. When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.
Billy Wilder
