Franz Liszt Quotes

Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.

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

In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.

My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.

I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.

The Jew continues to monopolize money, and he loosens or strangles the throat of the state with the loosening or strengthening of his purse strings...He has empowered himself with the engines of the press, which he uses to batter at the foundations of society. He is at the bottom of...every enterprise that will demolish first of all thrones, afterwards the altar, afterwards civil law.

The supreme harmony of the cosmos is selected in the harmony of the spirit.

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.

Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice.

For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life.

Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Truth is a great flirt.

The day will come when all nations amidst which the Jews are dwelling will have to raise the question of their wholesale expulsion, a question which will be one of life or death, good health or chronic disease, peaceful existence or perpetual social fever.

Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting-places - like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.

You cannot imagine how it spoils one to have been a child prodigy.

A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.

So let us not worry, and look instead as it has been taught us to do, as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, keeping complete faith in Our Father's goodness.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

A good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world.

Inspiration is enough to give expression to the tone in singing, especially when the song is without words.