Quotes from Arnold Schoenberg

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

My music is not lovely.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

Lucidity is the first purpose of color in music.

Rests always sound well.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

The expression "atonal music" is most unfortunate—it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning."

Art is the desperate cry of those who experience in themselves the fate of humanity.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played.

I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.

You cannot expect the Form before the Idea,For they will come into being together.

Of course, he seems to have quite a mind of his own and that is probably where he is weakest.

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!