Quotes By Gustav Mahler

The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.

I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone.

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

I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.

With the coming of spring, I am calm again.

It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces.

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.

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.

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.

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

Discipline, work. Work, discipline.

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

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.

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

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

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.

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

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

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.

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

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

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

In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.

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

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.

When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one.