Sufjan Stevens Quotes

Music is meant to be a beautiful thing.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things.

Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I think that, as a person, Beethoven talks to everyone in different ways.

I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy.

A music serves truth up to you in a really interesting way that allows you to luxuriate in its beauty and, at the same time, to hopefully see yourself in its fragility.

Music, the mosaic of the air.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Music is the perfect type of art.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

For me, singing was real life, not two plus two equals four.

I'm very expressive. Expressing my emotions and experiences through music has always been an important outlet for me. Many of my songs are influenced by personal events and experiences that I have gone through.

The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

I see a correlation between short stories and songs, because of their length and for what they're meant to evoke. Combine certain words with melodies and it all becomes very moving.

You can argue with a philosopher, but you can’t argue with a good song. And I think I’ve got a few good songs.

Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.

Eloquence the soul, song charms the senses.

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.