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Richard Wagner Quotes

Richard Wagner Quotes.

My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.
Richard Wagner
Imagination creates reality.
Richard Wagner
I write music with an exclamation point!
Richard Wagner
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
Richard Wagner
It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music’s reign begins.
Richard Wagner
I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.
Richard Wagner
The measures and acts which show us violently disposed towards the outer world can never stay without a violent reaction on ourselves.
Richard Wagner
…music is the living God in our bosoms.
Richard Wagner
I know absolutely nothing about music.
Richard Wagner
Wherever the fish are, that’s where we go.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.
Richard Wagner
Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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!
Richard Wagner
I wish I could score everything for horns.
Richard Wagner
Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
Everything lives and lasts by the inner necessity of its being, by its own nature’s need.
Richard Wagner
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
Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
Richard Wagner
Joy is not in things; it is in us.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
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.
Richard Wagner
Life is earnest – and always has been.
Richard Wagner