Hector Berlioz Quotes

#1. Passionate subjects must be dealt with in cold blood.

Hector Berlioz

#2. A feeble mind, conscious of its own feebleness, grows feeble under that very consciousness. As soon as the power of fear becomes known to it, there follows the fear of fear, and, on the first perturbation, reason abandons it.

Hector Berlioz

#3. Music and love are the wings of the soul.

Hector Berlioz

#4. The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments ... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst.

Hector Berlioz

#5. A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

Hector Berlioz

#6. Bach is Bach just as God is God.

Hector Berlioz

#7. Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.

Hector Berlioz

#8. It is so rare ... to find a complete person, with a soul, a heart and an imagination; so rare for characters as ardent and restless as ours to meet and to be matched together, that I hardly know how to tell you what happiness it gives me to know you.

Hector Berlioz

#9. Heine commenting on the music of Louis Hector Berlioz: He is an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle ... The music causes me to dream of fabulous empires, filled with fabulous sins.

Hector Berlioz

#10. At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.

Hector Berlioz

#11. If men of genius only knew what love their works inspire!

Hector Berlioz

#12. Which of the two powers, Love or Music, can elevate man to the sublimest heights? ... It is a problem, and yet it seems to me that this is the answer: 'Love can give no idea of music; music can give an idea of love.' ... Why separate them? They are two wings of the soul.

Hector Berlioz

#13. Imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.

Hector Berlioz

#14. He was dying all his life.

Hector Berlioz

#15. To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy.

Hector Berlioz

#16. Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.

Hector Berlioz

#17. Time, time - that is our greatest master! Alas, like Ugolino, time devours its own children.

Hector Berlioz

#18. Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

Hector Berlioz

#19. It is not enough that the artist should be well prepared for the public. The public must be well prepared for what it is going to hear.

Hector Berlioz

#20. Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.

Hector Berlioz

#21. The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

Hector Berlioz