Frederic Chopin Quotes

If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist! ~ Frederic Chopin

As long as I have health and strength, I will gladly work all my days. ~ Frederic Chopin

My earthly body has been a terrible disappointment to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

The crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me. I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb. ~ Frederic Chopin

One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to achieve certain unlimited dexterity. A well formed technique, it seems to me, can control and vary a beautiful sound quality. ~ Frederic Chopin

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars ... Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit ... I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man. ~ Frederic Chopin

I tell you piano the things I used to tell you ~ Frederic Chopin

Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, except, possibly two. ~ Frederic Chopin

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world ... ~ Frederic Chopin

I feel like a novice, just as I felt before I knew anything of the keyboard. It is far too original, and I shall end up not being able to learn it myself. ~ Frederic Chopin

Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes. ~ Frederic Chopin

The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying and the third that I'm going to die. ~ Frederic Chopin

Even in winter it shall be green in my heart. ~ Frederic Chopin

Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess). ~ Frederic Chopin

I shall create a new world for myself. ~ Frederic Chopin

Hats off, gentlemen - a genius! If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are canons buried in flowers. ~ Frederic Chopin

I could express my feelings more easily if they could be put into the notes of music, but as the very best concert would not cover my affection for you, dear daddy, I must use the simple words of my heart, to lay before you my utmost gratitude and filial affection ~ Frederic Chopin

A strange adventure befell me while I was playing my Sonata in B flat minor before some English friends. I had played the Allegro and the Scherzo more or less correctly. I was about to attack the March when suddenly I saw arising from the body of my piano those cursed creatures which had appeared to me one lugubrious night at the Chartreuse. I had to leave for one instant to pull myself together after which I continued without saying anything. ~ Frederic Chopin

England is so surrounded by the boredom of conventionalities, that it is all one to them whether music is good or bad, since they have to hear it from morning till night. For here they have flower-shows with music, dinners with music, sales with music ... ~ Frederic Chopin

Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel! ~ Frederic Chopin

Time is the best of critics; and patience the best of teachers. ~ Frederic Chopin

Nothing is more beautiful than the sound of the guitar. ~ Frederic Chopin

I don't know how it is, but the Germans are amazed at me and I am amazed at them for finding anything to be amazed about. ~ Frederic Chopin

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation,
but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head. ~ Frederic Chopin

The earth is suffocating ... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive. ~ Frederic Chopin

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano! ~ Frederic Chopin

They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

There are certain times when I feel more inspired, filled with a strong power that forces me to listen to my inner voice, and when I feel more need than ever for a Pleyel piano. ~ Frederic Chopin

It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you. ~ Frederic Chopin

Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover - somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. ~ Benjamin Zander

You already know when I'm writing, so don't be surprised if it's short and dry, because I'm too hungry to write anything fat ~ Frederic Chopin

Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning. ~ Frederic Chopin

So, having dried my tear-swollen eyelids, I take up my pen to inquire of you, are you alive or did you die? If you are dead, please let me know, and I will tell the cook, for ever since she heard about it she has been saying her prayers. ~ Frederic Chopin

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window ... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place. ~ Frederic Chopin

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long? ~ Frederic Chopin

As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes,I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong. ~ Frederic Chopin

The last thing is simplicity. After having gone through all the difficulties, having played an endless number of notes, it is simplicity that matters, with all its charm. It is the final seal on Art. Anyone who strives for this to begin with will be disappointed. You cannot begin at the end. ~ Frederic Chopin

If I were still stupider than I am, I should think myself at the apex of my career; yet I know how much I still lack, to reach perfection; I see it the more clearly now that I live only among first-rank artists and know what each one of them lacks. ~ Frederic Chopin

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness ... ~ Frederic Chopin

Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice. ~ Frederic Chopin

All the same it is being said everywhere that I played too softly, or rather, too delicately for people used to the piano-pounding of the artists here. ~ Frederic Chopin

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher. ~ Frederic Chopin

My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos ... in this respect this is a savage country. ~ Frederic Chopin

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. ~ Frederic Chopin

Among the numerous pleasures of Vienna the hotel evenings are famous. During supper Strauss or Lanner play waltzes ... After every waltz they get huge applause; and if they play a Quodlibet, or jumble of opera, song and dance, the hearers are so overjoyed that they don't know what to do with themselves. It shows the corrupt taste of the Viennese public. ~ Frederic Chopin

England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere. ~ Frederic Chopin

I have met a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known as George Sand ... Her appearance is not to my liking. Indeed there is something about her which positively repels me ... What an unattractive person La Sand is ... Is she really a woman? I'm inclined to doubt it. ~ Frederic Chopin

I've been working like a machine, and feeling like a lost soul. ~ Kate Chopin

Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers. ~ Frederic William Farrar

You [Chopin] have in your fingers an orchestra of butterflies. ~ Adam Mickiewicz

Today, nobody cares about European culture. We have a tradition, a vision, a culture of the past, we have legacy, but we don't have a present culture and we don't have a future. ~ Frederic Martel?

Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional, intense longing. ~ Kate Chopin

The profit of the one is the profit of the other. ~ Frederic Bastiat

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen. ~ Antonio Damasio

I don't mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much
so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole. ~ Kate Chopin

The true and equitable law of humanity is the free exchange of service for service. Spoliation consists in destroying by force or by trickery the freedom of exchange, in order to receive a service without rendering one. Forcible spoliation is exercised thus: Wait till a man has produced something; then take it away from him by violence. It is solemnly condemned in the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows. ~ Frederic Myers

The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force on that morning when we wake to find the mournful words "too late" ringing in our ears. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

I dance with people I despise; amuse myself with men whose only talent lies in their feet, gain the disapprobation of people I honor and respect; return home at day break with my brain in a state which was never intended for it; and arise in the middle of the next day feeling infinitely more, in spirit and flesh like a Liliputian, than a woman with body and soul. Entry (when she was eighteen) in her Commonplace Book, 1868-1869. ~ Kate Chopin

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

I wonder if any night on earth will be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad tonight. ~ Kate Chopin

By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. ~ Kate Chopin

You are burnt beyond recognition, he added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her fawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. The rings sparkled upon her fingers. He sent back an answering smile. ~ Kate Chopin

It is well known that large numbers of poor people attribute their poverty to what they call the tyranny of capital; meaning thereby the unwillingness of the owners of capital to allow others to use it without security for its safe return and compensation for its use. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

The Imperial throne was occupied by Frederic III, who had been rightly named the Peaceful, not for the reason that he had always maintained peace, but because, having constantly been beaten, he had always been forced to make it. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner. ~ John Tavener

The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span. ~ Donovan Hohn

Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary line and adding to one's liberty. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Men don't achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won't criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately - with a more premediated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish - to clutch at one's heart. ~ Marcel Proust

When I was thirteen I spent a lot of time pretending to like dance music because everyone at my school seemed to love it. If only I'd known it was OK to have different tastes to others and that one day my mind would be blown open by an older man who would introduce me to The Smiths, The Cure, Buzzcocks, Talking Heads and almost every other band I adore to this day. I also wish I'd been reassured that one day, yes, a boy would actually fancy me in spite and potentially, deliberately, FOR my zero boob/skinny legs combo. But mainly I wish I'd listened to my mother when she said learning to play the piano might come in handy in the future and would actually be something I would thank her for forcing me to do. Every Wednesday we would drive to Mrs Batten's house listening to The ArchersI, with me in the passenger seat trying desperately to think up excuses for why I hadn't practiced that week. Though it seemed very unlikely at the time, I am thankful for those piano lessons every time I manage to impress a boy by hammering out some Chopin when drunk (swot up, kids!). ~ Alexa Chung

Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets? ~ Kate Chopin

The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

If everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. ~ Frederic Bastiat

She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately - with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out - to strike at your heart. Brought ~ Marcel Proust

When Doctor Mandelet dined with the Pontelliers on Thursday he could discern in Mrs. Pontellier no trace of that morbid condition which her husband had reported to him. She was excited and in a manner radiant. ~ Kate Chopin

Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Peace of heart - without it, no good can make us happy. With it, every trial, even the approach of death, can be borne. ~ Frederic Ozanam

The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun - reject all systems, and try of liberty - liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work ~ Frederic Bastiat

Youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost. ~ Kate Chopin

If ever a fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely their union. ~ Kate Chopin

People do not want war. War springs from causes wholly outside the lives, interests, and feelings of the people. ~ Frederic C. Howe

Yes, as long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true mission, that it may violate property instead of securing it, 12everybody will be wanting to manufacture law, ~ Frederic Bastiat

It's still a cowl, Frederic grumbled (few things could cause him to summon up his inner courage like improper word usage). ~ Christopher Healy

I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so, - to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps. ~ Kate Chopin

Never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always; like God, to love always
this is duty. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

But the law is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men. And as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderating force, it must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate. This ~ Frederic Bastiat

She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them. ~ Kate Chopin

At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul - HOPE ~ Henri Frederic Amiel