Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Quotes

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

…You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions, and I have reached a very mature age without resting upon anything positive, without having calmed my restless spirit either by religion or philosophy. Undoubtedly I should have gone mad but for music. Music is indeed the most beautiful of all Heaven’s gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls. It is not the straw to which the drowning man clings; but a true friend, refuge, and comforter, for whose sake life is worth living

After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.

It is already a great thing if the main ideas and general outline of a work come without any racking of brains, as the result of that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.

I feel I shall live a long time.

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul’s moods.

We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavoring to meet it halfway, we easily become indirect and apathetic.

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry…As the poet Heine said, ‘Where words leave off, music begins.’

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Even in the works of the greatest master, the organic sequence can fail and then a skillful join must be made.