Richard Wagner Quotes

My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for ‘Tannhauser’ and brought it to completion.

The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.

Imagination creates reality.

I write music with an exclamation point!

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

It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music’s reign begins.

I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.

The measures and acts which show us violently disposed towards the outer world can never stay without a violent reaction on ourselves.

…music is the living God in our bosoms.

I know absolutely nothing about music.

Wherever the fish are, that’s where we go.

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts – the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.

It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.

The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.

Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.

Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.

Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment.

How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!

I wish I could score everything for horns.

Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.

The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.

Everything lives and lasts by the inner necessity of its being, by its own nature’s need.

What manner of thing this ‘public opinion’ is, should be best known to those who have its name forever in their mouths and erect the regard for it into a positive article of religion. Its self-styled organ in our times is the ‘Press.’

Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

I can’t distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; – I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; – I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.

I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.

The patriot subordinates himself to his State in order to raise it above all other States and thus, as it were, to find his personal sacrifice repaid with ample interest through the might and greatness of his fatherland.

Life is earnest – and always has been.