DISCOVER THE BEST BRAINY QUOTES OF
RICHARD WAGNER...

As we began with a general outline of the effects produced by the human beast of prey upon world

RICHARD WAGNER

From of old, amid the rage of robbery and blood

RICHARD WAGNER

It’s as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.

RICHARD WAGNER

Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of the earth. I had emerged from abstract Mysticism, and I learnt a love for Matter. Beauty of material and brilliancy of wit were lordly things to me: as regards my beloved music, I found them both among the Frenchmen and Italians. I forswore my model, Beethoven; his last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a whole great epoch of art, beyond whose limits no man could hope to press, and within which no man could attain to independence.

RICHARD WAGNER

This possibility, of always drawing from the pristine fount of our own nature, that makes us feel ourselves no more a race, no mere variety of man, but one of Manhood’s primal branches, — ’tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and spiritual heroes, as to whom we have no need to trouble whether fashioners of foreign fatherless civilisations are able to understand and prize them; whilst we again, inspired by the deeds and gifts of our forefathers, and gazing with unclouded eye, are able to rightly estimate those foreigners, and value them according to the spirit of pure Humanity indwelling in their work.

RICHARD WAGNER

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven.

RICHARD WAGNER

Joy is not in things; it is in us

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

Property has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social conscience than religion: for offence against the latter there is lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness. Since Property is deemed the base of all stability, the more’s the pity that not all are owners, that in fact the greater proportion of Society comes disinherited into the world. Society is manifestly thus reduced by its own principle to such a perilous inquietude, that it is compelled to reckon all its laws for an impossible adjustment of this conflict; and protection of property — for which in its widest international sense the weaponed host is specially maintained — can truly mean no else than a defence of the possessors against the non

RICHARD WAGNER

The most beautiful instrument, the oldest, the truest, the only origin to which our music owes its existence, is the human voice.

RICHARD WAGNER

If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood’s innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the goblin’s game of paper money. The Nibelung’s fateful ring become a pocket

RICHARD WAGNER

Oh, I hate the thought of all those costumes and grease paint! When I think that characters like Kundry will now have to be dressed up, those dreadful artists’ balls immediately spring into my mind. Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theatre!

RICHARD WAGNER

That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.

RICHARD WAGNER

It is not important to descend from the monkey; the essential thing is not to go back to it.

RICHARD WAGNER

There we see nothing but a clash of interests, whose object is common to all the disputants, common and ignoble: plainly the side most strongly organised, i.e. the most unscrupulous, will bear away the prize.

RICHARD WAGNER

I, who rule by means of contracts, am now slave to my contracts.

RICHARD WAGNER

I cannot conceive that a truly happy man could ever think of art. To really live is to have plenitude. Is art something other than an admission of our impotence?

RICHARD WAGNER

So let us save and tend and brace our best of forces, to bear a noble cordial to the sleeper when he wakes, as of himself he must at last.

RICHARD WAGNER

A moment of weakness comes, for everyone, but then he feels stupid, and listens to his good sense.

RICHARD WAGNER

Is art anything other than an admission of our powerlessness?

RICHARD WAGNER

I fixed my mind upon some theatre of first rank, that would some day produce it, and troubled myself but little as to where and when that theatre would be found.

RICHARD WAGNER

The necessity of love is the only one that is truly beautiful. To arrive at this knowledge, such is the task of the history of the world.

RICHARD WAGNER

Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings

RICHARD WAGNER

My child, all is lost for him, and he will never achieve the rank of ‘Master’ in any land, because someone who is born a master, always has the lowest standing among ‘Masters’.

RICHARD WAGNER

How noble to have a friend, but how much more noble to be a friend.

RICHARD WAGNER

The July Revolution took place; with one bound I became a revolutionist, and acquired the conviction that every decently active being ought to occupy himself with politics exclusively.

RICHARD WAGNER

If a student always follows the teacher’s instructions, how can he accomplish something which the teacher cannot accomplish? Now go away and don’t interfere, or I’ll put you into the fire!

RICHARD WAGNER

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

RICHARD WAGNER

At last one crowning horror gives the tortured wretch the needful strength: he wakes, and what he held most real was but a figment of the dæmon of distraught mankind.

RICHARD WAGNER

… forced to flee, he imagines that he is hunting. He does not hear his own cry of pain when he claws into his own flesh; he thinks he is expressing pleasure!

RICHARD WAGNER

He who desires, hopes and believes in himself is happy to see others hope and believe.

RICHARD WAGNER

I had translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey. For a while I learnt English also, merely so as to gain an accurate knowledge of Shakespeare; and I made a metrical translation of Romeo’s monologue. Though I soon left English on one side, yet Shakespeare remained my exemplar, and I projected a great tragedy which was almost nothing but a medley of Hamlet and King Lear. The plan was gigantic in the extreme; two

RICHARD WAGNER

Although my mother gave me courage [and power], I do not thank her for yielding to your trickery; prematurely aged, colorless and pale, I hate happy people, and nothing gives me pleasure!

RICHARD WAGNER

But it is precisely the role of Art to make this social instinct recognize its noble meaning, to show it its true direction. From its state of civilized barbarism, true art can only rise to its dignity on the shoulders of our great social movement; it has in common with it the goal, and they can only reach this goal if they recognize it in concert. This goal is the beautiful and strong man: that the Revolution gives him the Force, the Art, the Beauty.

RICHARD WAGNER

Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer’s shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled

RICHARD WAGNER

To my horror I always find only myself in all that I create; the Other, whom I need, I never find: a free man himself must create himself; I can only create slaves!

RICHARD WAGNER

If the Greek work of art contained the spirit of a beautiful nation, the work of art of the future must contain the spirit of free humanity outside all the limits of nationalities: the national character can only be in it an ornament, an attraction provided by the individual diversities, not an obstacle.

RICHARD WAGNER

Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.

RICHARD WAGNER

The knight’s song and direction I found new, but not confused; He left our path, but strode strongly and confidently. When you want to evaluate, according to rules, something which doesn’t follow your rules, You have to forget your own ways, And seek out its rules!

RICHARD WAGNER

Only strong men know Love, only love understands Beauty, only beauty forms Art. The love of the weak for each other can have no other expression than the tickling of voluptuousness; the love of the weak for the strong is humility and fear; the love of the strong for the weak is pity and indulgence: only the love of the strong for the strong is love, for it is the free gift of ourselves to the one who cannot constrain us. In all zones, in all races, men will be able to reach by real freedom to equal strength, by strength to true love, by true love to Beauty: but Beauty in action is Art.

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

Though physiologists are still divided as to whether Man was meant by Nature to feed exclusively on fruits, or also upon flesh

RICHARD WAGNER

Art is, in short, the expression of all the positive content of our life: it is today the highest manifestation of Love which cannot yet be realized directly by the complete union, material and spiritual, of man and woman, a union which would allow the two united beings to develop all their possibilities, to accomplish themselves entirely through each other. It is this advent of Love that all those who hope for a better future consciously or unconsciously wish for.

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

This is Alberich’s dream come true — Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.

RICHARD WAGNER

You, my suffering brothers from all classes of human society, who feel a deafening anger brewing within you, when you aspire to free yourselves from the slavery of money to become free men, understand our task well, and help us to raise Art to its dignity, so that we can show you, how you will raise the trade to the height of Art, the serf of industry to the rank of the beautiful man, conscious of himself, who, with the smile of the initiate, can say to nature, to the sun and the stars, to death and eternity: you too are mine, and I am your master!

RICHARD WAGNER

I am writing Parsifal only for my wife — if I had to depend on the German spirit, I should have nothing more to say.

RICHARD WAGNER

The error in the art

RICHARD WAGNER

Only strong men know Love, only Love understands Beauty, only Beauty forms Art.

RICHARD WAGNER

No clever person can help here; I see that clearly. Here, only stupidity can help the stupid one!

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