If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.
I owe my sucess in one per cent to my talent, in ten per cent to luck, and in ninety per cent to hard word. Work, work, and more work is the secret to success.
I cannot imagine a genuinely happy home without music in it.
The culture of any country is gauged first by its progress in art.
The very essence of success is practice.
The Pole listening to Chopin listens to the voice of his whole race.
If I do not practice one day; I know it. If I do not practice the next, the orchestra knows it; if I do not practice the third day, the whole world knows it.
Piano playing is more difficult than statesmanship. It is harder to awake emotions in ivory keys than it is in human beings.
You are a dear soul who plays polo, and I am a poor Pole who plays solo.
Every new generation in its hour of dawn, filled with the dreams of youth, its thirsts, intoxications and enthusiasms, thinks itself called upon to impel humanity towards heights unmeasured, believes itself an appointed pathfinder, a thinker of thoughts, a doer of deeds greater than any of those which came before. Every new generation desires beauty, but a beauty all its own.
Fatherland before everything, art afterward.
There flows throughout our whole history a stream of humanity, of generosity, of tolerance, so broad, so powerful, and so pure that it would be vain indeed to look for a similar one in the past of any other European country.
Art is the expression of the immortal part of man.
True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.
America, the country of my heart, my second home.
Man is naturally lazy, therefore he invents labor-saving devices.
Music is the only art that actually lives.
I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.
Chopin was an invalid, as you know, but his music was volcanic.
I do not believe, as do so many musicians, that genius should be left to fight its way to the light. Genius is too rare, too precious, to be permitted to waste the best years of life--the years of youth and lofty dreams--in a heart-breaking struggle for bread. To starve the soul with the body is to do worse than murder. Think, too, of what the public loses!
Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?
Rhythm is the pulse of music.
When one is an artist, what else can he be?
Music expresses first of all sadness rather than joy.
Before I was a genius I was a drudge.
