Hector Berlioz > Quotes

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students."

[Letter, November 1856]”
― Hector Berlioz

“Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.”
― Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs

“time is an excellent teacher - unfortunately it kills all its pupils”
― Berlioz Hector 1803-1869 Hector

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ...”
― Louis Hector Berlioz

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”
― Hector Berlioz

“A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”
― Hector Berlioz

“The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck. ”
― Hector Berlioz

“Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love. ”
― Hector Berlioz

“Il faut collectionner les pierres qu'on vous jette. C'est le début d'un piédestal.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”
― Hector Berlioz

“He was dying all his life.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Passionate subjects must be dealt with in cold blood.”
― Hector Berlioz

“The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.”
― Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs

“Time is a great teacher, but ufortunately, it kills all its pupils...”
― Louis Hector Berlioz

“...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.”
― Hector Berlioz, Life and Letters of Berlioz (Cambridge Library Collection - Music)

“Time is a great teacher. Too bad it kills all of its pupils.”
― Louis Hector Berlioz

“Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills its pupils.”
― Berlioz

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all pupils”
― Louis Hector Berlioz

“One evening we were exploring the Baths of Caracalla together, while debating the question of merit or demerit in human behaviour and its rewards in life. As I was propounding some outrageous thesis or another in answer to the strictly orthodox and pious views put forward by him, his foot slipped and the next moment he was lying in a bruised condition at the bottom of a steep ruined staircase.

'Look at that for divine justice,' I said, helping him onto his feet. 'I blaspheme, you fall.'

This irreverence, accompanied by roars of laughter, apparently went to far, and thenceforth all religious arguments were banned.”
― Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs

“La vie sert à faire des opéras-comiques.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it.”
― Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs

“It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold in my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence.

I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left me-to suffer.”
― Hector Berlioz

“La chance d'avoir du talent ne suffit pas ; il faut encore le talent d'avoir de la chance.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Se dice que el tiempo es un gran maestro; lo malo es que va matando a sus discípulos.”
― Hector Berlioz

“Où est la vérité ? où est l’erreur ? partout et nulle part. Chacun a raison ; ce qui est beau pour l’un ne l’est pas pour l’autre, par cela seul que l’un a été ému et que l’autre est demeuré impassible, que le premier a éprouvé une vive jouissance et le second une grande fatigue. Que faire à cela ?.. rien.... mais c’est horrible ; j’aimerais mieux être fou et croire au beau absolu.”
― Hector Berlioz, Beethoven

“Le temps est un grand professeur, mais malheureusement il tue ses élèves.”
― Hector Berlioz

“J’ai vu une chienne qui hurlait de plaisir en entendant la tierce majeure tenue en double corde sur le violon, elle a fait des petits sur qui la tierce, ni la quinte, ni la sixte, ni l’octave, ni aucun accord consonant ou dissonant, n’ont jamais produit la moindre impression. Le public, de quelque manière qu’il soit composé, est toujours, à l’égard des grandes conceptions musicales, comme cette chienne et ses chiens. Il a certains nerfs qui vibrent à certaines résonances, mais cette organisation, tout incomplète qu’elle soit, étant inégalement répartie et modifiée à l’infini, il s’ensuit qu’il y a presque folie à compter sur tels moyens de l’art plutôt que sur tels autres, pour agir sur lui ; et que le compositeur n’a rien de mieux à faire que d’obéir aveuglément à son sentiment propre, en se résignant d’avance à toutes les chances du hasard.”
― Hector Berlioz