Igor Stravinsky Quotes
"Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Time, Purpose, Man, Order)
"My music is best understood by children and animals."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Animals, Children)
"Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven."
- Igor Stravinsky
"The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, God, Church, Building, Praise)
"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."
- Igor Stravinsky
"The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Ending, Reason)
"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Work, Inspiration, Appetite, Beginning, Eating)
"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Love, Music, People, Appreciation, Respect, Trouble)
"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Effort, Merit)
"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, End)
"What force is more potent than love?"
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Love, Force)
"What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Artist)
"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?"
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music)
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Execution, Self)
"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Artists)
"Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?"
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Love, Being, Succeed)
"In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?"
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Love, Force, Order)
"I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Life, Time, Talent, God, Living, Sense, Service, Temperament)
"I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Genius, Variety, Will)
"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Life)
"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Life, Wisdom, Knowledge, Mistakes)
"I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Truth, Present, Today, Tomorrow, Will)
"I am an inventor of music."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music)
"Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune."
- Igor Stravinsky
"Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Drama, Film, Living, Reading)
"Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Music, Careers)
"A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Family, Animals)
"Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn."
- Igor Stravinsky
(Related: Money, May)