Gustav Mahler

“I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding.”

“It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.”

“The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.”

“The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.”

“I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”

“I beg of you... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise.”

“In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.”

“I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.”

“Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.”

“Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand.”

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

“I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young... he killed himself in the prime of his life.”

“To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.”

“What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.”

“The real art of conducting consists in transitions.”

“It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.”

“Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way.”

“You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.”

“I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.”

“There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.”