Top 100 Violin Quotes

I’ve played the violin since I was seven but stopped because there was a stage when it became ‘uncool’. I was listening to Nirvana and wanted to play the guitar, so I ditched the violin.

Although I wasn’t fond of the violin in the beginning, as I played on I developed a fondness which soon turned into a passion.

When I was young, I was being pushed, against my will, towards becoming a classical musician. I had music scholarships; I had to play the violin and do orchestra practice and that sort of stuff. That meant I didn’t get to do any school plays. I desperately wanted to do that.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

Since I first picked up the violin, I’ve been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.

I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.

I first played the Royal Albert Hall when I was 14. I was a violinist with the Birmingham Schools Concert Orchestra, and we travelled down from the Midlands for the last night of the School Proms. We played some pieces from the Harry Potter films, and the violin parts were really hard.

I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.

My grandma has a picture of Louis Farrakhan playing violin in her house.

It was really amazing. I mean, he’d never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

I had studied the violin to a certain amount of success. At some point, I realized that I didn’t really like the violin. I was only doing it because I could, and I was good at it, and everyone was encouraging me. But I didn’t have a great love for it.

I had no interest or intention of ever writing music. I was a professional violinist in my 20s. I was obsessed with conducting, and I was conducting as much as I could, and I was studying as much as I could. I went to USC; I got an undergrad degree in violin and a master’s degree in conducting.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I was playing violin for a long time, about 6 years. It takes a while. You need very patient people in your house when you have a violin.

Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can’t become a virtuoso in both.

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?

Cello is my first instrument, then piano, drums, bass, violin, recorder, saxophone, but I’d never play them live!

I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.

I started skiing around the same time as I began playing the piano, at around four, before moving to the violin at five.

We have a lot of pressures on children very young. We have ambition. We over-schedule our children. We want them to have soccer lessons and violin lessons… I think children need to have at least an hour of fun a day.

I’ve been playing the viola since I was 6 years old, and then I decided to switch it up a bit, so I’ve been playing the violin since I was 11. I started playing the piano when I was 11, and I started playing the guitar when I was 10.

I mean, I’m a Ukrainian immigrant from Brooklyn who grew up dancing and playing the violin!

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn’t need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I’ve been very unhappy with the results.

I don’t know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right?

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

I actually play piano and violin, but I don’t have a passion for it. It didn’t make me wake up in the morning wanting to do it, or go to bed thinking about it.

Of course the most difficult thing on the violin is always intonation. The second one is rhythm. If you play in tune, in time with a good sound that’s already high level. Those three are the main things.

I took up violin because my best mate had taken it up, so I did likewise.

Most kids are very seriously interested in something – friends, math, shopping, sports. For me it happened to be music and the violin. I had the chance to pursue it without having it get in the way of my life.

We had a normal childhood. I played baseball, and we played violin in orchestras three times a week. I learned more from that than anything else.

I was trained classically in violin and voice, which led to musical theater. Then I left the music scene to chase acting, which is when ‘Neighbours’ came along. It was a fantastic playground for actors, and the cast around me taught me a lot.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin – as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

I wasn’t making it with the violin because I was playing all of the ‘long hair’ stuff.

I grew up playing piano and violin, and then basketball took over.

I guess as a kid, I was always creative, and I was involved in music, like piano and violin and choir, so I always knew – I always knew that I wanted to do something that would allow me to be who I am. Generally, that was creatively, imaginatively.

If I started something, I had to finish. Like with violin. I started when I was seven only because my best mate wanted to. I hated it and wanted to quit, but Dad made me continue, and I got to grade seven. My parents said I had to know the value of stuff and work for stuff.

I loved music from a young age. At school I played the violin but I didn’t sing much; there was an expectation of the kids in the choir that they’d have really pure tones, and my voice had all this texture to it. The anodyne soul of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey was in the charts and I couldn’t relate to it.

I have a longing for violin or organ. Is it too simple to say those sustaining sounds symbolise immortality?

Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin – it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring.

What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I’m continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don’t, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth.

Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

I rode my bike to school, I was the head girl, I played the violin, was really nerdy. I was really underweight, so I was really skinny and under-confident. But I had Doc Marten boots! So I was a bit of an outsider. And clever as well.

I wound up sticking with violin because it was the strongest current in my life.

My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren’t very successful.

We get so many kids telling us that they’ve taken up the violin or cello. It’s really special, and it wasn’t really our intention in the beginning.

I hope I will always have the chance to play the violin.

I always find that there is a real communication between voice and violin.

Let me be very honest and just say that if any airline would let me take the violin and the laptop on board I would fly that airline all the time.

I do basically what a conductor does with a baton, except I also play along with the orchestra. So I have to juggle the roles of playing the concertmaster; sometimes I drop the violin and wave my arms.

I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.

I first picked up a violin aged five – I just assumed everyone played.

Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.

If I like dubstep and electronic, why don’t I make the violin fit me rather than making myself fit the violin?

A cello can sound like so many instruments, but it’s only one, you know, like a guitar; it has percussive qualities. It can sing like the violin, you know, like a voice.

Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax – I mean, I’m definitely having some sax. That’s just what I love. It’s going to be jazz-rock stuff. That’s what I’m aiming for.

If I’m playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

The only downside to playing the violin is that you never know when you’re going to be asked to play. I could be out to dinner or having a drink at a bar, and someone could just give me a violin, and I’ve got to be ready to play.

I’ve played classical violin since I was 5 years old.

I played the violin my whole life. I wanted to play from the time I was just a little kid, and I’ve always loved dance as well. I wanted to make people smile. I wanted to add an extra energy to my playing and make it visual and make it unique and fun.

It was sort of an experiment to try to leave the violin. Can I be a real person without this thing? It was a big part of my identity.

I would also like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

I had no idea I was gonna be a songwriter, because I was too young to know my own evolution. I started playing the violin as a way to express myself because I didn’t have a lot of vocabulary when I was 14.

My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths – that’s why I am so open.

I actually wanted to play the violin before I had polio, and then afterwards, there was no reason not to.

When I attained my seventh year, my father, whose ear was unmusical but who was nevertheless passionately fond of music, gave me my elementary lessons on the violin; in a very few months, I was able to play all manner of compositions at sight.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

Bach in general was so good with the violin. He just finds the genius way around his music on the instrument.

When I started learning the violin, my choir teacher thought I could sing. But when I first got on stage, I froze!

I studied classical violin and voice until I was 18 and by then I had had my fill.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

What I like about ‘Game of Thrones’ is that there’s such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.

I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.

The same way that I practiced the violin, the same way that I practiced my dance moves, I decided that I was going to practice being positive and practice loving myself.

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.

Edgar Meyer’s violin concerto was the first piece of contemporary music I worked on in any depth. I was 18 or 19.

If you put your hand on the piano, you play a note. It’s in tune. But if you put it on the violin, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. You have to figure it out.

I am playing the violin, that’s all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

When I was five I had violin lessons.

I know the lead singer of System of a Down, and I record violin tracks with him.

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Partita in E Major’ for violin. It was in a late-1980s television commercial, of all things. As a young violinist at the time, it enchanted me – it was so pure, precise, and unadorned.

I was up playing violin at seven and translating that information to play guitar, piano at eight.

As a young child, I played the violin. I think that that started the spark.

I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.

I have this weird musical thing I do: I play violin, and I even went on tour with Tim Robbins. We did a bunch of Canadian cities, and then went down to the States, and then we ended up in Japan.

Another thing that I don’t like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don’t pick up a violin at all.

My fourth birthday, I was given a violin, and my fifth birthday, a guitar. I didn’t start to play until I saw Hendrix on TV. They showed him setting his guitar on fire and burning it for the Monterey Pop Festival.

I’m a pretty good drummer. I’m pretty good at guitar, bass and piano. I can play accordion; I’m not virtuoso. I’ve played cello before. My sister played it, and I know how to play it, but I’m not the best. Violin is kind of the same thing.

We developed our own type of Igudesman and Joo electric violin, let’s say, and funny enough, the shape of it was developed by the head technician of Steinway. It’s actually an electric violin, which is made from the stick that holds up the piano lid.

The violin sings.

K.G. Sathar, a neighbour, was my guru. He taught me the violin and Hindustani music.

As a child, I studied violin. My sister, who’s 10 years older, was the actress in the family. I was painfully shy.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music – not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.

I’m incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I’ve always been like that.

Romanians love country dancing. At Christmas, you go house to house, and they play guitar and drum and a violin and everybody’s on their feet – well, it’s better than watching telly.

When I started learning the violin, my choir teacher thought I could sing. But when I first got on stage, I froze!