Giuseppe Verdi Quotes

So you're a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi. ~ Lemony Snicket

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

Stupid criticism and still more stupid praise. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid ~ Giuseppe Verdi

To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

You may have the universe if I may have Italy ~ Giuseppe Verdi

It is better to invert reality than to copy it. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

A man like Verdi must write like Verdi. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

The artist must yield himself to his own inspiraton, and if he has a true talent, no one knows and feels better than he what suits him. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

Show pity I beg you ...
We have today been struck down by fortune
But tomorrow it may be your own turn to die. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries ... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

An artist is one of two things: he is either a high priest, or a more or less smart entertainer. - GIUSEPPE MAZZINI ~ Leo Tolstoy

It is necessary; therefore, it is possible. ~ Giuseppe Antonio Borgese

When you are writing, you do not need to be as good as Poe, Shakespeare or Rowling. You need to be as good as you! ~ Giuseppe Bianco

Liberty and equality
lovely and sacred words! ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . .

For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

With my wolf's hunger
I haul my lamb's body
down like a sail
I am like
the wretched boat
and the lascivious sea ~ Giuseppe Ungaretti

Be open to suggestions, but don't let anyone dictate how you should tell your story. Who can possibly tell your story better than you? ~ Giuseppe Bianco

Never let your mind talk you out of what your heart wants. ~ Giuseppe Bianco

Leaping and looping with his little striped friends, verdi laughed and said "I may be big and very green, but I'm still me! ~ Janell Cannon

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Listen, I wanted to say, I don't need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here?
But I couldn't form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had regressed to one. I was frightened and shy, and it was all I could do to answer his questions and count the seconds until the end of the visit. ~ Jessica Verdi

Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

I've written a script which will help change consciousness and free people from an old dead Earth and help them make their journey to the new one where we will have true health, creativity, freedom, love and dream sharing. We are working on getting the funding for it and will be the deepest communication I've shared yet which goes back to your question up top. ~ Giuseppe Andrews

Don't daydream about your happily-ever-after, and don't wait for it to come; create it yourself. ~ Giuseppe Bianco

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

See, that's the problem with getting hit by lightning. You get burned. ~ Jessica Verdi

As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world? ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Love your country. Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

When one day Lagrange took out of his pocket a paper which he read at the Académe, and which contained a demonstration of the famous Postulatum of Euclid, relative to the theory of parallels. This demonstration rested on an obvious paralogism, which appeared as such to everybody; and probably Lagrange also recognised it such during his lecture. For, when he had finished, he put the paper back in his pocket, and spoke no more of it. A moment of universal silence followed, and one passed immediately to other concerns. ~ Jean-Baptiste Biot

No number before zero. The numbers may go on forever, but like the cosmos, they have a beginning. ~ Giuseppe Peano

Every Age has its own peculiar faith. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

Pardon is the virtue of victory. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Music is the fragrance of the universe. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

The family is the country of the heart. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

Necessity does not submit to debate. ~ Giuseppe Garibaldi

Reading is a way to escape the real world. Writing is a way to create a new one. ~ Giuseppe Bianco

I insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too. ~ Giuseppe Garibaldi

Opera once was an important social instrument - especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi, people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television. ~ Luciano Berio

When I was young, my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] brought home this recording of Verdi's Requiem and we listened to it from top to bottom. By the end of it, I was a completely different person. It was literally a requiem mass for my former self. I was about 12 or 13. The Requiem just totally hooked into what I was going through emotionally - discovering my sexuality right at the time when AIDS was devastating my community and dealing with intense parental situations. ~ Rufus Wainwright

I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though. ~ Rufus Wainwright

God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini