Richard Wagner Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.

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.

I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I wish I could score everything for horns.

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

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

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.

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

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

The immoral profession of musical criticism must be abolished.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never - never - never...

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