66 Sonata Quotes

Following is our list of sonata quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Sonata Quotes

Chamber music - a conversation between friends. - Catherine Drinker Bowen

Chamber music - a conversation between friends. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

A symphony is no joke. — Johannes Brahms

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony. — Fernando Pessoa

The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists. — Artur Schnabel

After all my years of doing instrumental music I still like just a simple instrumental song with a nice catchy melody and an opportunity to play a solo over a harmonic structure. — Stanley Clarke

u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality. — Glenn Gould

Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto. - Lope de Vega

Harmony is pure love, for love is a concerto. — Lope de Vega

. . . colors like a flourish of trumpets or pianissimo on the violin, great, calm, oscillating, splintered surgances . . . . Is this not form? — Giacomo Puccini

The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other. — Arthur Rubinstein

Bizet was a very young man when he composed this symphony, so play it softly. — Eugene Ormandy

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul - Plato

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul — Plato

A pretty girl is like a melody. That haunts you night and day. — Irving Berlin

Softly the evening came /with the sunset/. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Softly the evening came /with the sunset/. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You can't play a symphony alone, it takes an orchestra to play it. — Navjot Singh Sidhu

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. - Claude Debussy

There is nothing more musical than a sunset. — Claude Debussy

Sonnet Quotes

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone. — Tallulah Bankhead

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. — William Shakespeare

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. — David Ogilvy

Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence. — Keith Devlin

Summer's lease hath all too short a date. — William Shakespeare

All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me. — William Shakespeare

If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. — Robin Williams

The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. — H. L. Mencken

And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? — William Shakespeare

People Writing About Sonata

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Read quotes by Catherine Drinker Bowen

Catherine Drinker Bowen
quotes on education, love and marriage

25 153
Read quotes by Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms
quotes on love, education and music

29 707
Read quotes by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa
quotes on love, life

304 2711
Read quotes by Artur Schnabel

Artur Schnabel
quotes on education, life and leadership

20 333
Read quotes by Stanley Clarke

Stanley Clarke
quotes on music, life and world

19 106
Read quotes by Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould
quotes on life, music and love

26 673

More Sonata Quotes

When I sit in Paris in a cafe, surrounded by people, I don't sit casually - I go over a certain sonata in my head and discover new things all the time. — Arthur Rubinstein

I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes. — Sergei Prokofiev

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. — Samuel Beckett

Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there. — Elliott Carter

I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me. — Diane Kruger

Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables. — Arthur Rubinstein

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. — Terry Pratchett

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. — Alan Watts

Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal of technical work has to be done before the great works of violin literature, the sonatas and concertos, may be approached. — Leopold Auer

The perfection of conversation is not to play a regular sonata, but, like the AEolian harp, to await the inspiration of the passing breeze. — Edmund Burke

There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation on a theme. So musicians say the greatest sonatas are composed; whether or not it is true, I do not know, but of a surety I have seen it emerge in the tapestry of my life. — Jacqueline Carey

What I so like about Poussin and Cezanne is their sense of organization. Ilike the way in which they develop space and shape in architecturalcontinuity - the rhythm across their paintings. When I paint a landscape, Iget the greatest pleasure out of composing it. As I paint, I try to work outa visual sonata form or a fugue, with realistic images. — Ian Hornak

The Unicorn Sonata... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it. — Peter S. Beagle

Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year. — Andrew Sarris

My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses. — Alexander Scriabin

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse. Everybody wondered who the new arrival was. — John Ashbery

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? — Milan Kundera

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man. — Tom Rachman

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

I really love how the andante from the "A minor Sonata" sounds on the mandolin. — Chris Thile

The other option we have are medication treatments. So you'll have the treatments such as Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and we'll also have Rozerem and for some patients we use Benzodiazopine/Clonazepam. Things like that to help with anxiety. — Shelby Harris

Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great. — Frank Stella

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

I think anybody who's willing to really sink their teeth into a work like the Hammerklavier, which is a very interesting, different experience, should look instead at something like the Sonata by Paul Dukas, which, in my opinion, is a real marvel. — Marc-Andre Hamelin

I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger. — Philip Glass

For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp. — Chris Wyse

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

Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting. — David Gelernter

Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we'll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at "Chopsticks." The piano is not responsible. It's how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It's how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine. — Barbara Johnson

A strange adventure befell me while I was playing my Sonata in B flat minor before some English friends. I had played the Allegro and the Scherzo more or less correctly. I was about to attack the March when suddenly I saw arising from the body of my piano those cursed creatures which had appeared to me one lugubrious night at the Chartreuse. I had to leave for one instant to pull myself together after which I continued without saying anything. — Frederic Chopin

I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. A bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas. — Nikola Tesla

As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address. — Jeremy Denk

When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage — Daniel Gilbert

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. — Peter Ackroyd

The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe. — Rollo May

Many Introverts are also "highly sensitive," which sounds poetic, but is actually a technical term in psychology. If you are a sensitive sort, then you're more apt than the average person to feel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" or a well-turned phrase or an act of extraordinary kindness. You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience. — Susan Cain

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky. — Dejan Stojanovic

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip. — Henry Miller

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