Nadia Boulanger Quotes & Sayings

#1. The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

#2. 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

#3. Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.

Nadia Boulanger

#4. Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

Nadia Boulanger

#5. The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

Nadia Boulanger

#6. 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

#7. There is nothing boring in life except ourselves.

Nadia Boulanger

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

Nadia Boulanger

#9. Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

Nadia Boulanger

#10. [On the music of Richard Strauss:] Too many notes!

Nadia Boulanger

#11. I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

Nadia Boulanger

#12. To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

Nadia Boulanger

#13. Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.

Nadia Boulanger

#14. 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

#15. False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot.

Nadia Boulanger

#16. Nothing is better than music... it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

Nadia Boulanger

#17. 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

#18. Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.

Nadia Boulanger

#19. 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

#20. You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.

Nadia Boulanger

#21. Without order there can be no inner satisfaction. Without inner satisfaction there can be no freedom. Without freedom there is no joy.

Nadia Boulanger

#22. 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

#23. The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series.

Nadia Boulanger

#24. Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.

Nadia Boulanger

#25. [On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

Nadia Boulanger

#26. 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