Mahler 9 Quotes & Sayings

I hope you will no longer accuse me of a lack of delicacy. as I now count on your understanding. — Gustav Mahler

I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day. — Gustav Mahler

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion. — Gustav Mahler

At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper. — Jens Malte Fischer

I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone. — Gustav Mahler

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything. — Gustav Mahler

Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful.
Then, by the end of morning,
he's gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.
And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone. — Mary Oliver

I'm on the cross. be kind and they put you on the cross. that son of a bitch on his couch talking about Mahler and Kant and cunt and revolution, not really knowing about any of them. — Charles Bukowski

When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one. — Gustav Mahler

God can only be comprehended as Love. — Gustav Mahler

Anything of a serious nature isn't "instant" - you can't "do" the Sistine Chapel in one hour. And who has time to listen to a Mahler symphony, for God's sake? — Jonathan Cott

Tradition is laziness. — Gustav Mahler

I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment. — Gustav Mahler

New York City revived around the team. I don't think you can look at the recovery of New York from the 1970s without, on some level, talking about Steinbrenner. Even if you're just talking about the feel of the city, he was part of a creation of a new sense of optimism. — Jonathan Mahler

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation. — Gustav Mahler

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience. — Gustav Mahler

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes. — Gustav Mahler

I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier. — Gustav Mahler

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster. — Gustav Mahler

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. — Gustav Mahler

We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection. — Philip Kitcher

It's strange. When I put something incomprehensible into a picture, it's usually because the form and colour interest me and because it just happens to fit in. Thwn my friends come along : 'What is that suppose to mean _' And they rack their brains for an interpretation, finding so many ingenious explanations that I feel quite proud of all the unarticulated ideas concealed in my pictures." - Fernand Khnopff to Alma Mahler, while walking in the Prater in Vienna, from her diary July 1899 — Fernand Khnopff

I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case. — Philip Kitcher

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. — Gustav Mahler

All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish. — Gustav Mahler

Man lives in greatest pain — Gustav Mahler

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks. — Gustav Mahler

Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand. — Gustav Mahler

It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it. — Gustav Mahler

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty. — Clive James