Top 150 John Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements, it doesn’t have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.”

— John Williams

2. “Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.”

— John Williams

3. “You may need to refresh.”

— John Williams

4. “So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it’s gratifying to have something you have done linger in people’s memories.”

— John Williams

5. “A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.”

— John Williams

6. “It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. It was himself that he was slowing shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”

— John Williams

7. “The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that’s wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.”

— John Williams

8. “What did you expect?”

— John Williams

9. “Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.”

— John Williams

10. “They do the work, and he gets all the money. They think he’s a crook, and he thinks they’re fools. You can’t blame either side; they’re both right.”

— John Williams

11. “You think there’s something here, something to find. Well, in the world you’d learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.”

— John Williams

12. “Liefde is geen eindpunt, maar een proces, waarin de een probeert de ander te leren kennen.”

— John Williams

13. “My God, to read without joy is stupid.”

— John Williams

14. “He felt both shame and pride, and over it all a bitter disappointment, in himself and in the time and circumstance that made him possible.”

— John Williams

15. “I have come to believe that in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself.”

— John Williams

16. “I find that musically, looking back, I have learned much more from those relationships, people I have bumped into that I have admired, that’s the way I feel musically I have learned most in life.”

— John Williams

17. “So we are of the world, after all; we should have known that. We did know it, I believe; but we had to withdraw a little, pretend a little, so that we could –.”

— John Williams

18. “He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world.”

— John Williams

19. “You mustn’t give it up,” he said, and his voice took on an urgency that he could not understand. “No matter how hard it will seem sometimes, you mustn’t give it up. It’s too good for you to give it up. Oh, it’s good, there’s no doubt of it.”

— John Williams

20. “I’m not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I’ve done have been a small part of my work. What I’ve sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.”

— John Williams

21. “As if it were important, he strained his memory; beside the sofa there had been a large lamp with a round milk-white base encircled by a chain of painted roses, and beyond that, on the wall, neatly framed, was a series of water colors done by a forgotten aunt during her Grand Tour.”

— John Williams

22. “What did you expect? he asked himself.”

— John Williams

23. “Lust and learning. That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”

— John Williams

24. “It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.”

— John Williams

25. “Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!”

— John Williams

26. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you – that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”

— John Williams

27. “But before William Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.”

— John Williams

28. “Todos somos unos pobres diablos, y todos tenemos frio.”

— John Williams

29. “He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”

— John Williams

30. “The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it.”

— John Williams

31. “The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery.”

— John Williams

32. “But don’t you know, Mr Stoner?′ Sloane asked. ‘Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”

— John Williams

33. “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we – you and I and others like us – have brought up from the slime.”

— John Williams

34. “She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.”

— John Williams

35. “When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh.”

— John Williams

36. “There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”

— John Williams

37. “Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”

— John Williams

38. “Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont’s house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer.”

— John Williams

39. “Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing.”

— John Williams

40. “It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.”

— John Williams

41. “The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.”

— John Williams

42. “He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”

— John Williams

43. “Indeed, all of our past education will in some ways hinder us; for our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as the habits of medieval man determined his.”

— John Williams

44. “Some kids, for some reason, it just doesn’t click in the classroom as they need it to. We have college coaches talk to them, former high school athletes, motivational speakers, teachers, principals.”

— John Williams

45. “Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties toward her husband and family and that she must fulfill them.”

— John Williams

46. “A WEEK BEFORE commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University.”

— John Williams

47. “Innocent of fashion or custom, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might – as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends.”

— John Williams

48. “Years afterward, at odd moments, he would look back upon those days that followed his conversation with Gordon Finch and would be unable to recall them with any clarity at all. It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days;.”

— John Williams

49. “He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he had abandoned.”

— John Williams

50. “Middle age, my boy. No memory at all.”

— John Williams