Bela Bartok Quotes

#1. In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Bela Bartok

#2. Competitions are for horses, not artists.

Bela Bartok

#3. With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

Bela Bartok

#4. It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

Bela Bartok

#5. His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct ... these are all echoes ... of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

Bela Bartok

#6. By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist.

Bela Bartok

#7. Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

Bela Bartok

#8. I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

Bela Bartok