Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Quotes

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

Madam, you ask me how I compose. I compose sitting down.

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.

I like the plot of The Nutcracker - not at all.

The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity

What I need is to believe in myself again — for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.

I have put my whole soul into this work [The Pathetique Symphony] . . . You cannot imagine what joy I feel at the thought that my days are not yet over and that I may still accomplish much.

If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.

The muse doesn't come without being called.

I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.

A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.

Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music.

I feel I shall live a long time.

Even in the works of the greatest master, the organic sequence can fail and then a skillful join must be made.

Brahms stayed an extra day to hear my [Fifth] Symphony and was very kind ... I like his honesty and open-mindedness. Neither he nor the players liked the finale, which I also think rather horrible.

It is already a great thing if the main ideas and general outline of a work come without any racking of brains, as the result of that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.

When Brahms is in extra good spirits, he sings, "The grave is my joy".

Handel is only fourth rate. He's not even interesting.

What I have set down in a moment of ardour I must then critically examine. Sometimes I must do myself violence before I can mercilessly erase things thought out with love.

Mozart is the musical Christ.