Richard Wagner Quotes

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

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

The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.

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

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.

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

Imagination creates reality.

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

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

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

A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.

My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.

It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews. The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.

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.

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.

I write music with an exclamation point!

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

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

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.

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.

Wherever the fish are, that's where we go.

In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow

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.

I know absolutely nothing about music.

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.

Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.

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

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.

Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper.

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

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.

I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.

I wish I could score everything for horns.

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

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

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.