Top 44 Best Beethoven Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
Andre Previn
#5. In the country It seems as if every tree Said to me 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express The ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed. Happy every one in the woods. Every tree speaks through Thee. O God! What glory in the woodland.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#6. 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
#7. Music is the mediator between the life of the senses and the life of the spirit.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#8. I don't know if this is true to you but for me
sometimes it gets so bad
that anything else
say like
looking at a bird on an overhead
power line
seems as great as a Beethoven symphony.
then you forget it and you're back
again.
Charles Bukowski
#9. Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
John Ruskin
#10. Beethoven's symphonies are not 'relaxing.' They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.
Joshua Bell
#11. Off with you! You're a happy fellow, for you'll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that!
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#12. 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
#13. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.
E. M. Forster
#15. I play Beethoven and Bach. At the same
time, Biggie is my dog.
Alicia Keys
#16. He thought of death in its infinite groanings, of Aztecs ripping out living hearts and of cancer and three-year-olds buried alive and he wondered whether God was alien and cruel, but then remembered Beethoven and the dappling of things and "Hurrah for Karamazov" and kindness. He
William Peter Blatty
#17. 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
#18. I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.
Alexandra Stoddard
#19. If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.
Joshua Bell
#20. She was such a good loving mother, my best friend. Oh, who was happier than I when I could still say the dear name "Mother," and it was heard, and whom can I say it to now?
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#21. You will not find a treatise that is too learned for me; without laying claim to any genuine learning, I yet accustomed myself from childhood onwards to grasp the spirit of the best and wisest in every age. Shame on the artist who does not consider it his duty to achieve at least so much.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#23. Artists who have won fame are often embarrassed by it; thus their first works are often their best.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#24. The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse - it will not submit to the mold of flattery.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#26. If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk.
Leon Botstein
#27. Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#28. A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
#29. If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.
Kurt Masur
#30. Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.
Neville Marriner
#31. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Richard Dawkins
#32. People become who they are. Even Beethoven became Beethoven.
Randy Newman
#33. Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
Tom Stoppard
#38. 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
#40. And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, none of them were born in Vienna. They all moved there. It became a magnet, but what made it magnetized in the first place? There has to be a seed there. In the case of Vienna of about 1780, it was this deep-seated love of music.
Eric Weiner
#42. Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
John Ruskin
#43. I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage
#44. Those who know the marvels of chess and wonder why this game of all games does not enjoy greater popularity may also ask why Pepsi-Cola is consumed by more people than Chateau Lafite, or the Beatles are more familiar than Beethoven.
Gregor Piatigorsky
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
