Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Wagner

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German composer Richard Wagner.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.

German - Composer | May 22, 1813 - February 13, 1883

Source: Wikipedia

The measures and acts which show us violently disposed towards the outer world can never stay without a violent reaction on ourselves.

Richard Wagner

I can't distract myself enough here, for sketches to a new opera are constantly buzzing around in my head, to the extent that I need all my strength to wrest myself from them.

Richard Wagner

In no State is there a weightier law than that which centers its stability in the supreme hereditary power of one particular family, unconnected and un-commingling with any other lineage in that State.

Richard Wagner

Divorce is one of the most financially traumatic things you can go through. Money spent on getting mad or getting even is money wasted.

Richard Wagner

Everything lives and lasts by the inner necessity of its being, by its own nature's need.

Richard Wagner

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

Richard Wagner

Life is earnest - and always has been.

Richard Wagner

Even if I know I shall never change the masses, never transform anything permanent, all I ask is that the good things also have their place, their refuge.

Richard Wagner

Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries.

Richard Wagner

I have only a mind to live, to enjoy - i.e., to work as an artist, and produce my works; but not for the muddy brains of the common herd.

Richard Wagner

The patriot subordinates himself to his State in order to raise it above all other States and thus, as it were, to find his personal sacrifice repaid with ample interest through the might and greatness of his fatherland.

Richard Wagner

What manner of thing this 'public opinion' is, should be best known to those who have its name forever in their mouths and erect the regard for it into a positive article of religion. Its self-styled organ in our times is the 'Press.'

Richard Wagner

I am convinced that there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.

Richard Wagner

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

Richard Wagner

I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.

Richard Wagner

Though German art can never be Bavarian, but simply German, yet Munich is the capital of this German Art; here, under shelter of a Prince who kindles my enthusiasm, to feel myself a native and member of the people was, to me, the homeless wanderer, a deep, a genuine need.

Richard Wagner

How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!

Richard Wagner

I wish I could score everything for horns.

Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

Richard Wagner

Imagination creates reality.

Richard Wagner

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion.

Richard Wagner

Wherever the fish are, that's where we go.

Richard Wagner

We find personal success and great, if not enduring, influence on the outer fashioning of the world allotted to the violent, the passionate individual who, unchaining the elemental principles of human impulse under favoring circumstances, points out to greed and self-indulgence the speedy pathways to their satisfaction.

Richard Wagner

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

Richard Wagner

Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment.

Richard Wagner

I write music with an exclamation point!

Richard Wagner

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

Richard Wagner

It is a truth forever, that where the speech of man stops short there Music's reign begins.

Richard Wagner

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.

Richard Wagner

The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.

Richard Wagner

The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them.

Richard Wagner

...music is the living God in our bosoms.

Richard Wagner

For once you are going to hear a dream, a dream that I have made sound... I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing.

Richard Wagner

One siupreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy and imagination that ceates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.

Richard Wagner

The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.

Richard Wagner

That even in its sharpest pangs of pain a dog can still caress its master we have learnt from the studies of vivisectors.

Richard Wagner

I regard the Jewish race as the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it.

Richard Wagner

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.

Richard Wagner

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo.

Richard Wagner

Many's the man/ who thought himself wise/ but what he needed/ he did not know.

Richard Wagner

A political man is disgusting, but a political wife, horrible.

Richard Wagner

We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness

Richard Wagner

These revelations expressed through Art work upon the soul with a force carrying its own conviction and permeate our sentient life with a sense of truth which logic and mere reason are powerless to combat.

Richard Wagner

Music is the inarticulate speech of the heart, which cannot be compressed into words, because it is infinite.

Richard Wagner

Attack and defence, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.

Richard Wagner

Whatever I thought right, to others seemed wrong; what I held to be bad, others approved of.

Richard Wagner

My destiny is solitude, and my life is work.

Richard Wagner

What Music expresses is eternal, infinite, and ideal; she expresses not the passion, love, desire, of this or that individual in this or that condition, but Passion, Love, Desire itself, and in such infinitely varied phases as lie in her unique possession and are foreign and unknown to any other tongue...So...Here's to Victory, gained by our higher sense over the worthlessness of the vulgar! To Love, which crowns our courage...To the day, to the night!...And three cheers for Music.

Richard Wagner

Those who grasp the whole, will also comprehend all parts of that whole, even when immediate technical understanding is lacking, and recognize and marshal these.

Richard Wagner

If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.

Richard Wagner

I know absolutely nothing about music.

Richard Wagner

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.

Richard Wagner

It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews. The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.

Richard Wagner

In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow

Richard Wagner

The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.

Richard Wagner

When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.

Richard Wagner

Human dignity begins to assert itself only at the point where man is distinguishable from the beast by pity for it.

Richard Wagner

Whether government finances its added spending by increasing taxes, by borrowing, or by inflating the currency, the added spending will be offset by reduced private spending. Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money.

Richard Wagner

It should not be presumed that these people (the Jews), who are so separated from us by their religion, have any right to make our laws. But why blame the Jews? It is we who lack all feeling for our own identity, all sense of honour.

Richard Wagner

The purpose of art: to make the unconscious conscious.

Richard Wagner

Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Wagner

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