Explore Quotes by Daniel Barenboim

There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.

When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.

I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

Controversial means somebody who makes people think. And if you are afraid of people who will be against you, you might as well stay home and do nothing.

Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.

What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.

The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.

No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.