Richard Wagner Quotes

One siupreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy and imagination that ceates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.

I write music with an exclamation point!

That even in its sharpest pangs of pain a dog can still caress its master we have learnt from the studies of vivisectors.

I know nothing at all about music.

Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.

The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.

If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.

Divorce is one of the most financially traumatic things you can go through. Money spent on getting mad or getting even is money wasted.

...music is the living God in our bosoms.

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

I wish I could score everything for horns.

The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished.

Those who grasp the whole, will also comprehend all parts of that whole, even when immediate technical understanding is lacking, and recognize and marshal these.

The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.

It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all.

I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.

It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music's reign begins.

The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.

Blessed be, the genius who never knew good fortune! Genius in itself already means so much; what meaning does luck still hold for him?

I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.

I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.

The long-term vision is to replace, repair and regenerate failing tissues and organs with the materials of tissues and organs. It's still 'out there,' but it's possible to put together a grant proposal now that doesn't sound completely crazy.

These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.

Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.

Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

Imagination creates reality.

The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

For once you are going to hear a dream, a dream that I have made sound... I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing.

True drama can be conceived only as resulting from the collective impulse of all the arts to communicate in the most immediate way with a collective public... Thus especially the art of tone, developed with such singular diversity in instrumental music, will realize in the collective artwork its richest potential -- will indeed incite the pantomimic art of dancing in turn to wholly new discoveries and inspire the breath of poetry no less to an undreamed-of fullness. For in its isolation music has formed itself an organ capable of the most immeasurable expression - the orchestra.

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.

You know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never - never - never...

Whether government finances its added spending by increasing taxes, by borrowing, or by inflating the currency, the added spending will be offset by reduced private spending. Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money.

What Music expresses is eternal, infinite, and ideal; she expresses not the passion, love, desire, of this or that individual in this or that condition, but Passion, Love, Desire itself, and in such infinitely varied phases as lie in her unique possession and are foreign and unknown to any other tongue...So...Here's to Victory, gained by our higher sense over the worthlessness of the vulgar! To Love, which crowns our courage...To the day, to the night!...And three cheers for Music.

We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness

Any so-called stimulus program is a ruse. The government can increase its spending only by reducing private spending equivalently.

Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.

Music truely has to all other arts the same relation as religion to the church.

The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.

Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.

Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know.

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

I know absolutely nothing about music.