Inspiring Quotes from Classical Composers

Opulence of colour, sumptuousness of texture, meltingly expressive and exceedingly excellent are but some of the few adjectives that we can use to describe the works of great classical music maestros. An often overlooked area is the exquisite beauty, wisdom and inspiring value of their quotes. Join me, as we sample inspiring quotes that the great composers left unto us:

Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day.

--Franz Liszt

I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well

--Johann Sebastian Bach

                           

Muss es sein? Es Muss sein! Es muss sein! (Must it be? It must be! It must be!)

            -- Ludwig van Beethoven on the finale of his String Quartet in F Major)

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind

            --Johann Brahms

Young people can learn from my example that something can come from nothing. What I have become is the result of my hard efforts

            --Franz Joseph Haydn

Imagination creates reality.

            --Richard Wagner

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

            --Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart   

           

Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.

--Franz Schubert

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

            -- Wagner, letter to Liszt

As long as I have health and strength, I will gladly work all my days.

--Frederic Chopin

The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.

--Gustav Mahler

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.           

-- Ludwig van Beethoven, quoted in Marion M Scott, Beethoven (1934)