Composer Quotes

Dreams can never be made captive.

The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be.

Let it not be death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

There would be no sunshine in society if the born flatterers, I mean the so-called amiable people, did not bring it in with them.

When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.

[Heraclitus speaks as if] in entrancement ... but [also] truthfully.

The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

The thing which seems so glorious when viewed from the heights of the country's cause looks so muddy when seen from the bottom. One begins by getting angry and then feels disgusted.

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.

Righteousness exalteth a nation.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

By touching you may kill, by keeping away you may possess.

I do not give alms; I am not poor enough for that.

The greed for fruit misses the flower.

What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!--And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.

I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.

Those that achieve anything that looks beyond the vision and thinking of their peers provoke jealousy and hatred disguised as the ordinary.

Man and man's earth are unexhausted and undiscovered. Wake and listen! Verily, the earth shall yet be a source of recovery. Remain faithful to the earth, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth.

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

One should never know too precisely whom one has married

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.

In his lonely solitude, the solitary man feeds upon himself; in the thronging multitude, the many feed upon him. Now choose.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

The English are a nation of consummate cant.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good," there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument-though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.

Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.

History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.

And if ye cannot be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you, be at least its warriors. They are the companions and forerunners of such saintship.

Yet what each one does is by no means of little moment. The grass has to put forth all its energy to draw sustenance from the uttermost tips of its rootlets simply to grow where it is as grass; it does not vainly strive to become a banyan tree; and so the earth gains a lovely carpet of green.

What is life? A continuous praise and blame.

And, indeed, what little of beauty and peace is to be found in the societies of men is owing to the daily performance of small duties, not to big doings and fine talk.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

What is wanted - whether this is admitted or not - is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

The hours trip rapidly away, hiding their dreams in their skirts.

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority.

Great suffering brings with it the power of great endurance. When sorrow is deepest all the forces of patience and courage are banded together to do their duty. So while we are cowards before petty troubles, great sorrows make us brave by rousing our truer manhood.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.