Top 100 Quotes About Beethoven
#1. Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.
Karen Armstrong
#3. When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.
Madeleine L'Engle
#4. In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.
Edvard Grieg
#5. Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows?
Eddie Van Halen
#6. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.
Thomas Mann
#7. Come on," she said, smiling for the first time since she'd stepped on the plane. "We need to get to the bus before Ian plugs his iPod into the speakers."
Dan shuddered. "I'd rather face a thousand Vespers than listen to Beethoven.
Clifford Riley
#8. It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.
Dean Koontz
#9. Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you.
Max Lucado
#10. I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Antonio Damasio
#11. I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.
Pele
#12. 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
#13. Frank Zappa ... was Beethoven for insane rock guys.
Scott Ian
#14. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
#15. Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.
Joshua Bell
#16. There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.
Virginia Graham
#17. Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.
Jane Asher
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
Edward Abbey
#21. 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
#22. If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed, as Shakespear wrote.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#23. 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
#24. Beethoven can't really be great because his picture isn't on a bubble gum card.
Charles M. Schulz
#25. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were not classical musicians while they were alive and active, they were the rock stars of their day.
Seymour Stein
#26. 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
#27. In these few minutes, I was Beethoven's captive and I couldn't have been a more willing participant.
Stormy Smith
#28. With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
Paul Lansky
#29. 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
#30. I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.
John Edensor Littlewood
#31. 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
#32. What do we teach our children? ... We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique ... You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Pablo Casals
#33. Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.
Jacques Barzun
#34. I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world ...
Frederic Chopin
#35. 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
#36. I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
#37. I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.
Joshua Bell
#38. You are no more in your body than Beethoven is inside your radio.
Deepak Chopra
#40. 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
#41. Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Berg imply a type of pianist who is intellectual. That's not always associated with female soloists.
Jeffrey Tate
#42. 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
#43. [...] 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
#44. A burst of Beethoven that would have made the composer glad he was deaf erupted from her i-Phone.
Ian Simpson
#45. Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#46. Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.
Jan Morris
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.
Tyler Cowen
#51. 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
#52. Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.
Charles Hazlewood
#53. 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
#54. The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.
Daniel Silva
#55. What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.
Marianne Williamson
#56. Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.
Oswald Spengler
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H.L. Mencken
#61. 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
#62. I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.
Kurt Masur
#63. 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
#64. In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
#65. I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
Ringo Starr
#66. On behalf of all that is good and melodic, Ludwig van Beethoven, I apologize.
Sarah Strohmeyer
#67. 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
#68. I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Jascha Heifetz
#69. 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
#70. I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.
John Zorn
#71. Beethoven and Beatles, Mozart and Michael Jackson, Paganini and Prince - I like them all.
Vanessa Mae
#72. At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck.
Engelbert Humperdinck
#73. Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
Daniel Barenboim
#74. In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
Daniel Barenboim
#75. Our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we are hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb.
William Badke
#76. I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
James Ellroy
#77. Beethoven was ugly too, and no woman ever loved him, and he was Beethoven! He didn't need to be loved in order to do what he did. He just needed to love and he did.
Jose Saramago
#78. 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
#79. At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#80. The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
Billy Wilder
#81. What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.
Brian Greene
#82. I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!
Candy Crowley
#83. 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
#84. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
Slavoj Zizek
#85. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand.
Adam M. Grant
#86. 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
#87. I would not guess Knight was a classical man. I would guess he was an unbelievably good-looking psychopath but not one who listed to Beethoven (or whoever).
Kristen Ashley
#88. To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.
Terry Eagleton
#89. In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
Michael Dirda
#90. 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
#91. You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!
Michael Tilson Thomas
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
#96. 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
#97. Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.
Nigel Kennedy
#98. And I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger clicks the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.
Andrea Gibson
#99. Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
Emile M. Cioran
#100. People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
Witold Lutoslawski
