Great musician and composers about creativity

I should be sorry if I only entertained them, I wish to make them better.
George Frideric Handel (February 23, 1685 –April 14, 1759), German-born British Baroque composer

Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
George Frideric Handel

It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach (March 31, 1685 –July 28, 1750), German composer and organist

Music is an agreeable harmony for the honour of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach

I want to do something creative, not just easy.
Johann Sebastian Bach

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul
Johann Sebastian Bach

To write great music, the musician must make his life a great song. … Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.
Johann Sebastian Bach

God and the permissible delights of the soul. I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.
Johann Sebastian Bach

I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results. The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.
Johann Sebastian Bach

There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach

What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.
Johann Sebastian Bach

Harmony is next to Godliness.
Johann Sebastian Bach

Face to the reality.
Johann Sebastian Bach

When I am ….. completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) Austrian composer

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Music must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or, in other words, must never cease to be music.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. …All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I change many things, discard others, and try again and again until I am satisfied. Then, in my head, I begin to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height, its depth… I hear and see the image in front of me from every angle, as if it had been cast, and only the labour of writing it down remains.
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827), German composer and pianist

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig Von Beethoven

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.
Gioachino Rossini (February 29, 1792 –November 13, 1868), Italian composer

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.
Hector Berlioz (December 11, 1803 –March 8, 1869), French composer

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.
Hector Berlioz

A nation creates music – the composer only arranges it.
Mikhail Glinka (June 1, 1804 – February 15, 1857), Russian composer

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
Felix Mendelssohn (February 3, 1809 –November 4, 1847), German composer

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
Felix Mendelssohn

Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure.
Felix Mendelssohn

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
Frédéric Chopin (March 1, 1810 –October 17, 1849), Polish composer and pianist

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frédéric Chopin

Only when the form grows clear to you, will the spirit become so too.
Robert Schumann ( June 8, 1810 –July 29, 1856), German composer and critic

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm. To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts, such is the duty of the artist.
Robert Schumann

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ’s religion illuminates with His divine light.
Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886), Hungarian composer and pianist

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.
Franz Liszt

The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.
Franz Liszt

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
Franz Liszt

The public is always good.
Franz Liszt

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.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 –February 13, 1883), German composer

Imagination creates reality.
Wilhelm 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.
Wilhelm Richard Wagner

I write music with an exclamation point!
Wilhelm Richard Wagner

I adore art… when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
Giuseppe Verdi (October 10, 1813 –January 27, 1901), Italian composer

Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.
Johannes Brahms (May 7, 1833 –April 3, 1897), German composer and pianist.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannes Brahms

It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.
Johannes Brahms

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry…As the poet Heine said, “Where words leave off, music begins”.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (May 7, 1840 –November 6, 1893), Russian composer

I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o’clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted… to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.
Edvard Grieg (June 15, 1843 –September 4, 1907), Norwegian composer and pianist

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man’s faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.
Giacomo Puccini (December 22, 1858 –November 29, 1924), Italian composer

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
Richard Strauss (June 11, 1864 –September 8, 1949), German composer

Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music…
Sergei Rachmaninov (April 1, 1873 –March 28, 1943), was a Russian-born composer and pianist

Competitions are for horses, not artists.
Bela Bartok (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945), Hungarian composer and pianist

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.
Leopold Stokowski (April 18, 1882 – September 13, 1977), British born American conductor

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
Igor Stravinsky (June 17, 1882 –April 6, 1971), Russian, and French – American composer and pianist

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
Igor Stravinsky

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937), American composer and pianist.

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.
George Gershwin

I like any and all of my associations with music -writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the December 27, audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.
Duke Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974), American composer and jazz-orchestra leader

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
Dmitri Shostakovich (September 25, 1906 –August 9, 1975), Soviet Russian composer and pianist

A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.
Dmitri Shostakovich

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant (December 27, 1906 – August 14, 1972), American pianist and composer

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
Gian Carlo Menotti ((July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007), Italian-American composer

Music is nothing separate from me. It is me… You’d have to remove the music surgically.
Ray Charles (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), American musician

Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
Henri Kaiser (born 19 September 1952), American guitarist and composer