Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument — that, friends, is real wisdom.

…the violin — that most human of all instruments…

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Many people do not realise that it takes considerably more art and skill to play the violin lightly than it does to play it loudly. Indeed, the best possible training for young violinists is learning to play pianissimo and without pressure.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

You play the violin like an angel. Play it; play something light and lively. Get this cursed bad business off your mind.

Life is a piano what you get out of it depends on how you play it

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

Performance of the violinist -- it's all in the interpretation and all the virtuosity comes out of the context of the interpretation!

I wouldn’t play it in public — you need different muscles, you can’t use the upper arm, just the fingers. But the sound has a glow, because the strings aren’t damped, as on a piano. I wanted to visit Bach’s sound world, then apply those ideas to the piano.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.