Quotes from 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.

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

Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper.

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!

Imagination creates reality.

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.

Whatever my passions demand of me, I become for the time being - musician, poet, director, author, lecturer or anything else.

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.'

I wish I could score everything for horns.

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

Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: "I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come", and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: "You see, my son, time turns here into space

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never - never - never...

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.

Blessed be, the genius who never knew good fortune! Genius in itself already means so much; what meaning does luck still hold for him?

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

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.

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

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.

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