Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am permanently relaxed.
I don't like possessions.
Every note is a lifetime for itself.
The Germans are prisoners of their past.
I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.
No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.
Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.
You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.
Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.
When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.
I believe education is much more important than we assume.
I don't believe that the entire world is constantly anti-Semitic.
When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.
For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.
In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don't play music at funerals.
To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.
When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.
I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.
Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.
Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.
I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.
The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.
In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.
Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music.
Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.
The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.
You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.
Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.
I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.
I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.
Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.
Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.
I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.
Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music...to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations.
I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.
An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.
You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.
Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.