Ludwig van Beethoven

“To play a wrong note is insignificant. To play without passion is inexcusable!”

Pablo Casals

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.”

George Enescu

“The artist reveals to mankind the way to harmony, which is happiness and peace.”

Ivry Gitlis

“Dear young colleagues of the up-and-coming generation, please have the courage to be yourselves, to take risks and not be copies of your recordings or of others’. Practice your instrument in order to free yourself from any psycho-technical constraint, to be able to create when you play. Listen to your inner ear, which is connected directly to your heart and spirit, the one that tells you what you feel is you! And the one you don’t feel isn’t you. Remember that a beautiful “wrong” note by a Kreisler, a Thibaud, a Casals, or a Callas is worth more than a thousand so-called “right” notes and that playing that is hygienically and clinically correct is not necessarily a sign of good health! Take heart! Good health to you!”

Fritz Kreisler

“Courage, energy, and patience are the virtues which appeal to my heart.”

David Oistrakh

“The main thing is not to lose your identity and to continue working.”

Anne-Sophie Mutter

“But the necessity for providing a material basis for all forms the arts transcends all economic ups and downs. Musicians have long not been satisfied with simply eking out a living through the performance of their art. Much more important is that they be afforded dignity and artistic freedom.”

Itzhak Perlman

“It’s always easy to become a passenger on the journey in sound, just adding volume to the whole. But if you play in an individual way, it makes the difference between good and great sound in an orchestra.”

Shinichi Suzuki

“Art is not in some far-off place. A work of Art is the expression of a man’s whole personality, sensibility, and ability.”

“When love is deep, much can be accomplished.”

Ludwig van Beethoven

“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets.”

Jascha Heifetz

“The discipline of practice every day is essential. When I skip a day, I notice a difference in my playing. After two days, the critics notice, and after three days, so does the audience.”

“There is no top. There are always further heights to reach.”

“Take a chance. If you miss it, it will hurt only once.”

“A violinist should always be happy when he is playing. If he is playing well, he should be happy that he is playing well. If he is not playing well, then he should be happy because it will soon be over.”

Itzhak Perlman

“There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at a young age. I wasn’t, thank God.”

“There is no such thing as getting rid of nervousness.”

Malcolm Arnold

“Music is the social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is.”

Ludwig van Beethoven

“I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.”

“Music can change the world.”

“Music is a high revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”

“Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”

“Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”

Leonard Bernstein

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”

Hector Berlioz

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

John Cage

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

Aaron Copland

“So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it.”

Claude Debussy

“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”

Frederick Delius

“Music is an outburst of the soul.”

Edward Elgar

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.”

George Frideric Handel

“I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.”

Gustav Holst

“Music, being identical with heaven, isn’t a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It’s a condition of eternity.”

Gustav Mahler

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”

Claudio Monteverdi

“The end of all good music is to affect the soul.”

Modest Mussorgsky

“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.”

Sergei Rachmaninov

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”

Maurice Ravel

“The only love affair I have ever had was with music.”

“Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.”

Jean Sibelius

“Music begins where the possibilities of language end.”

Dmitri Shostakovich

“A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.”

Robert Schumann

“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.”

Igor Stravinsky

“I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

Toru Takemitsu

“Music is a form of prayer.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“Music is not illusion, but revelation rather. Its triumphant power lies in the fact that it reveals to us beauties we find nowhere else, and that the apprehension of them is not transitory, but a perpetual reconcilement of life.”

Giuseppe Verdi

“I adore art… when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.”

Richard Wagner

“Imagination creates reality.”

Carl Maria von Weber

“An artist’s sphere of influence is the world.”

Ray Charles

“I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know of, since none of my relatives could sing or play an instrument. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me – like food or water.”

Bob Marley

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

Elvis Presley

“Well, by God, I’ll tell you something, friend: I have never been strung-out in my life, except on music!”

Albert Einstein

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Oscar Wilde

“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.”