98 Violinist Quotes
Following is our list of violinist quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about music violin.
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Famous Violinist Quotes
The violin - that most human of all instruments. — Louisa May Alcott
Violin playing is a physical art with great traditions behind it. — Vanessa Mae
When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story. — Joshua Bell
A violin should be played with love, or not at all. — Joseph Wechsberg
To play the violin for the buffalo to listen to. — Thai Proverbs
I hope I will always have the chance to play the violin. — Joshua Bell
A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument that I must care for. — Josephine Baker
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle. — Leonard Bernstein
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm — Leonard Bernstein
Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. — E. M. Forster
Do you think I give a damn about your and your pathetic violin? — Ludwig van Beethoven
I know that the most joy in my life has come to me from my violin. — Albert Einstein
If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place. — Robert Schumann
From a broken violin do not expect fine music — Greek Proverbs
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. — Samuel Butler
Short Violinist Quotes
- Never miss an opportunity to teach; when you teach others, you teach yourself. — Itzhak Perlman
- How do I get to Carnegie Hall? — Mischa Elman
- Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
- Chess is no whit inferior to the violin, and we have a large number of professional violinists — Mikhail Botvinnik
- At the end of '69 I did a gig with Jean Luc Ponty here in L.A. He was an electric violinist. — George Duke
- I felt as out of place as a left-handed violinist in a crowded string section. — Chic Murray
- This young man is an exceptionally gifted and talented violinist ... He is a first class talent. — Ruggiero Ricci
- Hello again, violinist,' he said in a hoarse voice. 'Fancy meeting you here. — Regina Doman
Playing Violin Quotes
I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins. — Quincy Jones
If I wanted to play the violin, I had to work. Because anything that one wants to do really, and one loves doing, one must do everyday. It should be as easy to the artist and as natural as flying is to a bird. And you can’t imagine a bird saying well, I’m tired today, I’m not going to fly! — Yehudi Menuhin
The violin doesn’t play for everybody. — Polish Proverbs
If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe. — John Corigliano
Learning to play golf is like learning to play the violin. It's not only difficult to do, it's very painful to everyone around you. — Hal Linden
The age of a person doesn't matter. The sweetest music is played on the oldest violin. — Jessie Andrews
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. — Honore de Balzac
It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. — Edmond de Goncourt
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice. — Alain de Botton
Music Violin Quotes
The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched. — Neal A. Maxwell
Violin for me is a great instrument because you can use it as a rhythmical instrument and also as a melodic instrument. ... You can pretty much do everything with the violin. Sometimes I feel classical music limits the violin. — David Garrett
God, as a loving Father, will stretch our souls at times. The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched. . . . God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference! — Neal A. Maxwell
And I'll dance with you in Vienna, I'll be wearing a river's disguise. The hyacinth wild on my shoulder my mouth on the dew of your thighs. And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook, with the photographs there and the moss. And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross. — Leonard Cohen
Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti. — Neville Marriner
An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism. — Daniel Barenboim
Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time. — Joseph Campbell
Marriage is like a violin. After the music is over, you still have the strings. — Unknown
We are like violins. We can be used as doorstops, or we can make music. — Barbara Sher
Even though I started playing the violin when I was four, my early chamber music experiences helped build a strong foundation for my solo work, as all music is a rich language and dialogue that is shared on stage, no matter what the size of the ensemble. — Anne Akiko Meyers
Viola Quotes
I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful. — Jean Sibelius
The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer. — Victor Borge
Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses? — Adam Johnson
What we did [shooting "Fences"] was we got young students from Carnegie Mellon, the acting and theater students, and we had them as our understudies. I told them, "You have to be off book and be ready. If Viola [Davis] has to leave you have to jump in." — Denzel Washington
I'll find you- Keep calling for me, Viola- Cuz here I come. — Patrick Ness
As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves! — Jan Karon
The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece. — Elliott Carter
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand. — Twyla Tharp
I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder. — Gavin Bryars
I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. — Blythe Danner
People Writing About Violinist
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Joshua Bell |
36 | 128 |
 Leonard Bernstein |
59 | 959 |
 Louisa May Alcott |
354 | 2780 |
 Vanessa Mae |
23 | 57 |
 Thai Proverbs |
71 | 1 |
 Josephine Baker |
43 | 1033 |
More Violinist Quotes
The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult. — Uta Hagen
Music is the thousandth of a millisecond between one note and another; how you get from one to the other-that's where the music is. — Isaac Stern
Drugs and sex go hand in hand when you're a rock and roll musician. Whereas if I were a violinist, it might be a little different. — Slash
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. — Gustave Flaubert
I'm incapable of functioning without music. I've always had it in my life. I played the violin when I was a kid, and my mother was a violinist at that point, so it's always been important to me in one way or another. When I work, there's always music cranking. — Peter Dundas
But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio. — Yiyun Li
Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty. — John Philip Sousa
A famous violinist once said. Music transcends words. By exchanging notes, you get to know one another, to understand one another. As if your souls were connected and your hearts were overlapping. It's a conversation through instruments. A miracle that creates harmony. In that moment, music transcends words. — KAORI
The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine. — David Finckel
For twelve years I studied and worked at them every day, and I was nearly 25 before I had the courage to play one of them in public. Before I did, no violinist or cellist had ever played a Suite in its entirety. — Pablo Casals
A guitar is a piece of wood, and if this piece is resonating in a period of 40 or 60 years, it kind of gets to know what it is after awhile... the reason violinists play violins that are hundreds of years old. The wood learns to sing. — Dave Genn
A lot of my joy this year has been to give away awards to young people, no matter of race, creed or color, because they were a terrific violinist or a terrific dancer. — Sally Kirkland
My Sims family is called the Cholly family. I don't know why I picked that name; it's kind of random. — Gerard Way
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you. — David Ogden Stiers
Whether you want to be the top violinist or a CEO, strangely enough, hard work and perseverance can overcome a lot of things. — J Clifford Hudson
That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra. — Anne Rice
I thought - being a musician doesn't help your medical credibility really. Although I started to rethink that when I learned that Albert Einstein was quite a violinist and in fact would perform a lot with symphonies. So if it's good enough for Albert, it's good enough for me. — Neal Barnard
Men think God is destroying them because he is tuning them. The violinist screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack. — Henry Ward Beecher
When you can hear a violinist, that is better than you, then you learn from him, because if you play with somebody who is worse than you, then you go down. — Ruggiero Ricci
Years ago, I heard an interview with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The interviewer said, "Do you still practice?" And he said, "I practice every day." He said, "If I skip a day, I can hear it. If I skip two days, the conductor can hear it. And if I skip three days, the audience can hear it." Oh, yes, you have to keep that muscle firm. — Donald E. Westlake
If it's one thing we learned from the first book, it's that you don't have to be a prizefighter, or a world-renowned architect, or a concert violinist to have been affected by the power of words. — Marlo Thomas
I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer. — Nigel Kennedy
The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well. — Peter Drucker
If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon. — Aleister Crowley
The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet. — Yehudi Menuhin
The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within. — Yehudi Menuhin
I'm one of the boys, no better than the last second violinist. I'm just the lucky one to be standing in the center, telling them how to play. — Eugene Ormandy
Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing. — Kate Christensen
Looking for inspiration in expression, I have actually always looked to singers and violinists. I have never really looked only at the recorder as a remedy for my expressions. — Michala Petri
My father is a violinist and my mother is a pianist, so I've been hearing music all my life. I started playing at three and had my first music teacher at five. — Michala Petri
When people watch me on TV they see part of my life. I wanted to let them know the real me behind the scenes. The child who was a concert violinist from the age of six. The young woman who took on the challenge to compete in the Miss America pageant. The television journalist for twenty-five years. The mother of two who, just like most women, struggles to balance work and family. — Gretchen Carlson
Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same." — Albert Einstein
I get nervous calling myself an artist. I feel I'm more like an interpreter or a violinist, you know. — Meryl Streep
I used to wish I would be a painter or a violinist, where maybe I wouldn't need to travel as much. Or maybe if I were a writer, I wouldn't need to travel as much. It's the travel that kind of killed me. And the hours. I always pictured if I were a painter you could make your own hours maybe... work after the kids were asleep. — Kathy Baker
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
The way you hold the bow, the way that violinists are trained to produce a note, is really different. I'm not an expert in classical music. I don't want to say something that ends up in print and somebody comes running after me with a shovel, but they're taught for each note to stand alone in a very deliberate kind of way, which is really different than how notes are strung together in old-time music to create rhythm. — Bruce Molsky
I was always jealous of my violinist friends and cellist friends who traveled with their instruments. — Christian McKay
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