Violinist Quotes

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. (G. K. Chesterton)

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 was always jealous of my violinist friends and cellist friends who traveled with their instruments.

Christian McKay

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

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

Every violinist has a different style, so it's important to be able to recognise their styles. You don't have to like everyone's style but you have to know these styles.

Ruggiero Ricci

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

In playing Beethoven the violinist should be a medium. There is little that is personal or that can be reduced to ingratiating sounds, pleasing slides and so on. Everything is dictated by the significance, the weight, structure and direction of the notes and passages themselves.

Yehudi Menuhin

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

For almost a century, Jascha Heifetz was the performer all others wished to emulate, a genius whose technique and musicianship earned him accolades as "the perfect violinist." (Jascha Heifetz)

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

Yesterday there was a Concert Spirituel. The symphony by Haydn was lovely and the execution very good. Mademoiselle Wendling and a Welsh tenor Giuliano were hissed. Danner and another Welsh violinist Giuliani were overall applauded. A sinfonia concertante by the brothers Thonberg [Romberg] got applause. The concert on the bassoon by Devienne so so.

Joseph Martin Kraus

[make drawings of] series of instruments and players; their shapes, twisting of the hands, arms and neck of the violinist; for example, puffing out and hollowing of the cheeks of bassoonists, oboists, etc..

Edgar Degas

The folksong collectors Bartok (Hungary) and Plicka (Czechoslovakia) notated the perceived interval deviations with a plus or minus sign (+,-). Older folksong collectors had notated all the intervals in the system of semitones, not observing the finer modifications of intervals. This first gained currency from the phongraph and tape recordings of folk music from various lands....From folksong I learned to perceive melodic intervals a little smaller or greater than those of the semitone-system....In my youth it often happened that the folk singers, who during the intermissions of dance festivals sang songs of "their kind," deviating from the semitone system, demanded that the first violinist of the Wisowitzer Kapelle play "their" melody just as they sang it. Once a tempermental singer threatened to strike the double-bass player with a beer mug if he didn't "play along" with the song, exactly as he sang it.

Alois Hába

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that it does not touch yours? How shall I lift it gently up over you on to other things? I would so very much like to tuck it away among long lost objects in the dark, in some quiet, unknown place, somewhere which remains motionless when your depths resound. And yet everything which touches us, you and me, takes us together like a single bow, drawing out from two strings but one voice. On which instrument are we strung? And which violinist holds us in his hand? O sweetest of songs.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

Honoré de Balzac

He was credited with his own brand of yoga, and taught author Aldous Huxley and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, among other celebrities.

B.K.S. Iyengar

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

Ellen Barkin

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

I knew I could never match my father as a violinist, and there were already four generations of outstanding cellists in the family. (Leonard Slatkin)

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

György Ligeti

My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.

Zubin Mehta

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 started playing the violin when I was three years old. I was actually born and bred to be a concert violinist.

Tomo Milicevic

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