Quote

It is always the same with me only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words.

Gustav Mahler

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Gustav Mahler
Age: 50 †
Born: 1860
Born: July 7
Died: 1911
Died: May 18
Classical Composer
Composer
Conductor
Musician
Mahler
Something
Compose
Always
Composing
Expressed
Hardly
Musician
Words
Experience
Nature

More quotes by Gustav Mahler

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Life's been nothing but paperwork.
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It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces.
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To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
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Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.
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I don't choose what I compose. It chooses me.
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But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me and this helps me again and again.
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Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.
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The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
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I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.
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The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.
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In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
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In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.
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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.
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When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one.
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Both my marriages were failures! Number one departed, and number two stayed
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There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.
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I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.
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In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
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Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand.
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I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.
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