Nadia Boulanger Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

Nadia Boulanger
Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

Nadia Boulanger
To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must forget them.

Nadia Boulanger
In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves — which makes us more indulgent and more understanding — and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

Nadia Boulanger
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.

Nadia Boulanger
It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

Nadia Boulanger
As far as the execution is concerned... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.

Nadia Boulanger
Without a strong cup to carry the emotion, it is only a curiosity. Great art can come to us only in strong cups. Without emotion, there is nothing to carry.

Nadia Boulanger
You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.

Nadia Boulanger
Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.

Nadia Boulanger
A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.

Nadia Boulanger
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.

Nadia Boulanger
I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

Nadia Boulanger
The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways.... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.

Nadia Boulanger
Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

Nadia Boulanger
It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

Nadia Boulanger
Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.

Nadia Boulanger