Gustav Mahler Quotes

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

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.

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

It is a funny thing, but when I am making music, all the answers I seek for in life seem to be there, in the music. Or rather, I should say, when I am making music, there are no questions and no need for answers.

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

To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.

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.

Both my marriages were failures! Number one departed, and number two stayed

Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

I don't choose what I compose. It chooses me.

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

God can only be comprehended as Love.

That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.

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

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation.

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

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

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

Discipline, work. Work, discipline.

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

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

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

In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.