Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

What I need is to believe in myself again— for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Music possesses incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for the articulation of the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present — this is my life.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Of music:
It is a faithful friend, protector and comforter, and for its sake alone life in this world is worth living. Who knows, perhaps in heaven there will be no music. So let us live on the earth while we still have life!

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
The difference is that music possesses much richer means of expression and is a more subtle medium for translating the thousand shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavoring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
According to my deep conviction, Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music. No one has made me weep, has made me tremble with rapture, from the consciousness of my nearness to that something which we call the ideal, as he has done.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
It is already a wonderful thing if just the main ideas and general outline of a work come without the racking of brains, through that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Do not believe those who try to persuade you that composition is only a cold exercise of the intellect. The only music capable of moving and touching us is that which flows from the depths of a composer's soul when he is stirred by inspiration.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
I never compose in the abstract; that is to say, the musical thought never appears otherwise than in a suitable external form. In this way I invent the musical idea and the instrumentation simultaneously.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky