Quotes By Gustav Mahler

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

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

The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.

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

Fortunately, something always remains to be harvested. So let us not be idle.

The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking.

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

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

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

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.