Gustav Mahler

Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.

The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.

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.

I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young... he killed himself in the prime of his life.

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

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

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.

Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

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

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

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

Destiny smiles upon me but without making me the least bit happier.

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

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.

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.

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.

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

All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.

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