Great Throughts Treasury

"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."

"Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love."

"A feeble mind, conscious of its own feebleness, grows feeble under that very consciousness. As soon as the power of fear becomes known to it, there follows the fear of fear, and, on the first perturbation, reason abandons it."

"A singer who is able to sing even sixteen measures of good music in a natural and engaging way, effortlessly and in tune, without distending the phrase, without exaggerating accents to the point of caricature, without platitude, affectation, or coyness, without making grammatical mistakes, without illicit slurs, without hiatus or hiccup, without making insolent changes in the text, without barks or bleats, without sour notes, without crippling the rhythm, without absurd ornaments and nauseating appoggiaturas ? in short, a singer able to sing these measures simply and exactly as the composer wrote them ? is a rare, very rare, exceedingly rare bird."

"A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine."

"At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings."

"Agonies thrilled through me as if my blood were running ice cold in my veins. I stopped composing. My mind became feebler as my feelings grew more intense."

"He was dying all his life."

"Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down."

"Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?"

"I feel grateful to the happy chance which forced me to compose freely and in silence, and has thus delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought."

"Imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine."

"Instrumentation is to music precisely what color is to painting."

"Heine commenting on the music of Louis Hector Berlioz: He is an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle. . . . The music causes me to dream of fabulous empires, filled with fabulous sins."

"The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck."

"That is, in fact, the true female voice of the orchestra ? a voice at once passionate and chaste, heart-rending, yet soft, which can weep, sigh, and lament, chant, pray, and muse, or burst forth into joyous accents, as none other can do."

"The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst."

"The author of The Prophet not only has the good luck to have talent, he has also the talent to have good luck."

"This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me. The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash. I recognized the meaning of real grandeur, real beauty, and the real dramatic truth."

"Time, time - that is our greatest master! Alas, like Ugolino, time devours its own children."

"You request me to tell you ... if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet"?"