Quotes from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Madam, you ask me how I compose. I compose sitting down.

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

The creative process is like music which takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity

Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music.

When Brahms is in extra good spirits, he sings, "The grave is my joy".

Brahms stayed an extra day to hear my [Fifth] Symphony and was very kind ... I like his honesty and open-mindedness. Neither he nor the players liked the finale, which I also think rather horrible.

To regret the past, to hope in the future, and never to be satisfied with the present: that is what I spend my whole life doing

The muse doesn't come without being called.

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.

I feel I shall live a long time.

What I have set down in a moment of ardour I must then critically examine. Sometimes I must do myself violence before I can mercilessly erase things thought out with love.

I have put my whole soul into this work [The Pathetique Symphony] . . . You cannot imagine what joy I feel at the thought that my days are not yet over and that I may still accomplish much.

It is already a great thing if the main ideas and general outline of a work come without any racking of brains, as the result of that supernatural and inexplicable force we call inspiration.

What I need is to believe in myself again — for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.