Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Barenboim

US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.

The Iranian government still denies the Holocaust - so you can't take them seriously. And the Israeli government spreads rumours and disinformation about Iran - because it needs to for the creation of panic. I find these theological states - and in this respect, Israel and Iran are twin brothers - very, very dangerous.

Most of the time I spend looking for the 25th hour in the day, the ninth day in the week, the 32nd day in the month and the 367th, eighth or 70th day in the year because I feel I have a very rich life.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.

I have accumulated so many experiences, so much, that I want to be able to realize so many things. This is why I have basically given up most of my positions.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

People need to have enough to eat and have work and money. But there are other things that are important.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.

I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.

When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.

I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

I am permanently relaxed.

Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.

There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.

You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.

We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.

I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.

I believe education is much more important than we assume.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.

I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.

I am the conductor for life of the Staatskapelle in Berlin, which fills me with tremendous joy because I feel absolutely at one with them. When we play, I have a feeling that together we manage to create one collective lung for the whole orchestra so that everybody in the stage breathes the music in the same way.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.

The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.

I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.

What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.

I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

The problem with listening to music today is that there's so much of it everywhere. We've got used to hearing music without actually listening to it.

I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.