Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Casals

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish musician Pablo Casals.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Pau Casals i Defilló, usually known in English by his Castilian Spanish name Pablo Casals, was a Spanish and Puerto Rican cellist, composer, and conductor. He is generally regarded as the pre-eminent cellist of the first half of the 20th century and one of the greatest cellists of all time. He made many recordings throughout his career of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, including some as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings of the Bach Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy.

Spanish - Musician | December 29, 1876 - October 22, 1973

Source: Wikipedia

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

Pablo Casals

The heart of the melody can never be put down on paper.

Pablo Casals

The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.

Pablo Casals

Music will save the world.

Pablo Casals

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

Pablo Casals

To retire is to die.

Pablo Casals

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.

Pablo Casals

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.

Pablo Casals

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do.

Pablo Casals

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

Pablo Casals

You must work - we must all work to make the world worthy of its children.

Pablo Casals

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

Pablo Casals

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

Pablo Casals

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Pablo Casals

I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.

Pablo Casals

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?

Pablo Casals

To retire is to begin to die.

Pablo Casals

Beauty is all about us, but how many are blind! They look at the wonder of this earth and seem to see nothing. People move hectically but give little thought to where they are going. They seek excitement ... as if they were lost and desperate.

Pablo Casals

Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.

Pablo Casals

The simplest things in music are the ones that count. The simplest thing are, of course, also the most difficult to achieve and take years of work.

Pablo Casals

As long as one can admire and love, then one is young forever.

Pablo Casals

To live is not enough; we must take part.

Pablo Casals

The miracle of Bach has not appeared in any other art. To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervour, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.

Pablo Casals

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner... I go to the piano, and I play preludes and fugues of Bach... It is a sort of benediction on the house.

Pablo Casals

There is no substitute for work; what seems ease of performance comes from the greatest labor.

Pablo Casals

The truly important things in life - love, beauty, and one's own uniqueness - are constantly being overlooked.

Pablo Casals

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

Pablo Casals

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.

Pablo Casals

For me, Bach is like Shakespeare. He has known all and felt all. He is everything.

Pablo Casals

Parents shouldn't lie to their children-not even when they think it's for their own good. Even a little lie is dangerous.

Pablo Casals

I don't have hobbies. I have passions.

Pablo Casals

I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.

Pablo Casals

If you play Bach every day, you are not so alone.

Pablo Casals

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

Pablo Casals

What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.

Pablo Casals

The person who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age.

Pablo Casals

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man.

Pablo Casals

The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step.

Pablo Casals

Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it.

Pablo Casals

It takes courage for people to listen to their own goodness and act on it.

Pablo Casals

I was at Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco hiking when a boulder came hurling down the mountainside and smashed my left hand. When I looked at my mangled bloody fingers, I had a strange reaction. 'Thank God I will never have to play again,' I said. The fact is that dedication to one's art does involve a sort of enslavement.

Pablo Casals

For twelve years I studied and worked at them every day, and I was nearly 25 before I had the courage to play one of them in public. Before I did, no violinist or cellist had ever played a Suite in its entirety.

Pablo Casals

Resist doing things that have no meaning for life.

Pablo Casals

Rock n' roll is poison put to sound.

Pablo Casals

Don’t be vain because you happen to have talent. You are not responsible for that; it was not of your doing. What you do with your talent is what matters.

Pablo Casals

I see in the melody of Nature, God. It is a wonderful work of art. The spirit of the art is wonderful. And I feel that I am myself because I have never taken music lightly. Music is the manifestation of God, like everything else.

Pablo Casals

Do we dare be ourselves? That is the question that counts.

Pablo Casals

I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature.

Pablo Casals

To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.

Pablo Casals

To be a musician is a great privilege but it is also a very great responsibility. One must think that to be a musician is a gift - a gift from Nature. There is no great merit in us except in loving this gift with respect and devotion and doing everything possible to honor that gift by work and more work. We must work with conviction and humility, searching for beauty, simplicity, and the Truth. And it is for us musicians to do all in our power for a better world. Music must carry the message of beauty, of love and of peace.

Pablo Casals

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe; a moment that never was before and never will be again.

Pablo Casals

When you play Bach like Chopin, and Chopin like Bach, something good happens.

Pablo Casals

Throughout my career, nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at, I feel as bad as I did the very first time.

Pablo Casals

Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity.

Pablo Casals

We are not free to walk on our neighbor's toes.

Pablo Casals

The greatest respect an artist can pay to music is to give it life.

Pablo Casals

Of course, I continue to play and to practice. I think I would do so if I lived for another hundred years.

Pablo Casals

Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes.

Pablo Casals

You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.