Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

My music is not lovely.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

There are no more geniuses, only critics.

Rests always sound well.

Of course he seems to have quite a mind of his own and that is probably where he is weakest.