Best Mahler Quotes

#1. I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

Philip Kitcher

#2. What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

Gustav Mahler

#3. You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Clive James

#4. Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

Philip Kitcher

#5. I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

Rufus Wainwright

#6. I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

Gustav Mahler

#7. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

Gustav Mahler

#8. It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

Gustav Mahler

#9. Life's been nothing but paperwork.

Gustav Mahler

#10. I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone.

Gustav Mahler

#11. In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.

John Tavener

#12. My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.

Patti LuPone

#13. Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.

Gustav Mahler

#14. What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

Gustav Mahler

#15. Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#16. All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.

Gustav Mahler

#17. To be passionate in today's world is not politically correct ... Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler's problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure.

Lorin Maazel

#18. I beg of you ... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise.

Gustav Mahler

#19. Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.

Gustav Mahler

#20. It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.

Gustav Mahler

#21. I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.

Gustav Mahler

#22. I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.

Gustav Mahler

#23. I'm on the cross. be kind and they put you on the cross. that son of a bitch on his couch talking about Mahler and Kant and cunt and revolution, not really knowing about any of them.

Charles Bukowski

#24. Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

Gustav Mahler

#25. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

James Horner

#26. I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding.

Gustav Mahler

#27. If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.

Gustav Mahler

#28. If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Gustav Mahler

#29. Only when I experience do I compose - only when I compose do I experience.

Gustav Mahler

#30. Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

Gustav Mahler

#31. It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

Gustav Mahler

#32. New York City revived around the team. I don't think you can look at the recovery of New York from the 1970s without, on some level, talking about Steinbrenner. Even if you're just talking about the feel of the city, he was part of a creation of a new sense of optimism.

Jonathan Mahler