A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything…

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

- Ralph Vaughan Williams