Beethoven Quotes

“Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats...”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“[When asked why are numbers beautiful?]

It’s like asking why is Ludwig van 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

“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

“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, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“And the goblins--they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or ex-President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.”
― John Berryman

“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 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, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning

“When Beethoven made sharp response to a letter from his brother Karl, who embellished his signature with the phrase “land-owner,” the composer added “brain-owner” to his own autograph.”
― Russell Sherman, Piano Pieces

“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, Wait, You're Not a Centaur: 50-50 Word Stories and Drawings

“Only art and science can raise men to the level of gods.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a good eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing it as you get by looking at Titian's 'Entombment of Christ' in the Louvre, by listening to Beethoven's 'Eroica' or by reading Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', how are you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than mine? Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic appreciation has a moral effect on your character.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Vagrant Mood

“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.”
― Beethoven

“Just as it was not necessary for Beethoven to know the science of the physical manufacture of the instruments in his orchestra in order for him to compose, it is not necessary for you to understand vortex based mathematics, fractal field theory, dodecahedrons, geometric solids, calculus, Fibonacci series, centripetal force, and quantum physics in order to become enlightened.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“Nowadays, people no longer know Beethoven's Ninth from concerts, but form the for lines of the 'Ode to Joy' that they hear every day in the ad for Bella Perfume.”
― Milan Kundera

“روحم را در وجودِ خود بگنجان و آن را به سرزمینِ معنا بفرست”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“He [Thomas Mann] remembered this Beethoven quartet [his op. 132] as being sad, sometimes mournful. What was surprising now was that, while the undertone was melancholy, the way the instruments stopped and started and then moved into melody made it uplifting. The suffering in the music was buried in every note, but so too was something almost stronger, some sense of an unyielding beauty that after a few minutes rose, as though surprised at its own vigor, into a sound that made him stop thinking, stop trying to find meaning in this, and simply listen, let his spirit absorb what was being played.
...To move from the bombast of the symphonies to the unearthly loneliness of this quartet, , he though, must have been a journey that even Beethoven himself could not easily comprehend. It must have come as though some strange, tentative, shivering knowledge emerged suddenly into clarity.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Magician

“Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.”
― Ludwig van Beethoven

“The second number goes off like a top - so fast indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they would answer without thinking - 4, 967, 289.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Težina, nužnost i vrijednost tri su međusobno povezana pojma: teško je samo ono što je neophodno, samo ono što je teško ima vrijednost.
To se uvjerenje rodilo iz Beethovenove glazbe, pa iako je moguće (čak vjerojatno) da su za njega odgovorni više Beethovenovi izdavači nego sam kompozitor, danas ga dijelimo manje-više svi. Veličina čovjeka za nas je u tome što nosi svoju sudbinu kao što Atlas nosi na ramenima nebeski svod. Beethovenov junak je dizač metaforičkih tereta.”
― Milan Kundera

“Joy through suffering: this phrase (extracted from one of Beethoven's letters, where it actually referred to an uncomfortable coach journey) became the central motto of the Beethoven cult [..].”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“He felt the sense of what he was after, just a little ahead of him. The problem was how to bring it near – or reach out and grasp it. The problem was to know exactly what it was. A work of art had to be beautiful, of course, but beautiful in a new way. It had to be new, but new in a beautiful way. A kind of pincer operation was required, to take hold of something that might appear to exist already – fully formed, even sounding – but that would come into existence only very slowly, quarter-note by quarter-note, in the act of composition.”
― Paul Griffiths, Mr Beethoven

“As the love symphony
of Beethoven wafted
in the air, you and I
made love last
Saturday afternoon.
And the neighbor's dog
barked madly, every time
our bed creaked
from all the gyrations
that you and I
could outmaneuver
in our frenzy of wanting
each other's body and soul!”
― Avijeet Das

“But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish?”
― Fred Uhlman, Reunion

“Do you perambulate at dawn?
The acacia on your right and the jacaranda on the road down the lane.

Mornings in Kathmandu are symphonies.
Tchaikovsky on a Monday, and Beethoven on a Saturday.

What voices speak to you?
Some days I hear the ghosts of extinct bees, and some days I hear the spirits of butterflies.

Today morning I read fragments from the writings of Kafka. Have you read the writings of Kierkegaard?”
― Avijeet Das