All Quotes By Tag: Beethoven

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business: Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing.”

“The great artistic figure of the nineteenth century, who impressed himself deeply upon the imagination of Europe, was Beethoven. Beethoven is visualised as a man in a garret, poor, unkempt, neglected, rough, ugly; he has thrown away the world, he will have none of its wealth, and although the rewards are offered, he rejects them. He rejects them in order to fulfill himself, in order to serve the inner vision, in order to express that which demands, with an absolute imperative force, that it be expressed. The worst thing that a man can do is to ‘sell out’, to betray an ideal. That alone is despicable – despicable because the only thing which makes values values, which makes some things right and others wrong, the only thing which can justify conduct, is this inner vision.”

“You’ll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven’s or Bach’s music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats…”