Hector Berlioz Quotes

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its students." [Letter, November 1856]

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. —LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

time is an excellent teacher - unfortunately it kills all its pupils

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ...

Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.

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

Hector Berlioz’s witty comment, “Time is the great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all of its students.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.

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

Il faut collectionner les pierres qu'on vous jette. C'est le début d'un piédestal.

He was dying all his life.

manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Hugo Wolf.

Passionate subjects must be dealt with in cold blood.

Time is a great teacher, but ufortunately, it kills all its pupils...

Time is a great teacher. Too bad it kills all of its pupils.

...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all pupils

La vie sert à faire des opéras-comiques.

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it.

One evening we were exploring the Baths of Caracalla together, while debating the question of merit or demerit in human behaviour and its rewards in life. As I was propounding some outrageous thesis or another in answer to the strictly orthodox and pious views put forward by him, his foot slipped and the next moment he was lying in a bruised condition at the bottom of a steep ruined staircase. 'Look at that for divine justice,' I said, helping him onto his feet. 'I blaspheme, you fall.' This irreverence, accompanied by roars of laughter, apparently went to far, and thenceforth all religious arguments were banned.

Se dice que el tiempo es un gran maestro; lo malo es que va matando a sus discípulos.

Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. —Hector Berlioz

Le temps est un grand professeur, mais malheureusement il tue ses élèves.

La chance d'avoir du talent ne suffit pas ; il faut encore le talent d'avoir de la chance.

He opened up a new world in music,” said French Romantic master Hector Berlioz, who idolized the deaf composer. “Beethoven is not human.”[23]

Time is a great teacher, But unfortunately, it kills all its pupils. —Hector Berlioz

Hector (1803-69), French composer; full name Louis-Hector Berlioz. Notable works: Les Troyens (opera, 1856-59), Symphonie fantastique (1830), and La Damnation de Faust (cantata, 1846). berm   n. a flat strip of land, raised bank, or terrace bordering a river or canal.    a path or grass strip beside a road.  an artificial ridge or embankment, e.g., as a defense against tanks.  a narrow space, esp. one between a ditch and the base of a parapet.  early 18th cent. (DENOTING A NARROW SPACE): from French berme, from Dutch berm. Ber·mu·da (also the Ber·mu·das)   a British crown colony made up of about 150 small islands about 650 miles (1,046 km) east of the coast of North Carolina; pop. 58,000; capital, Hamilton. Inhabited since 1609, it now has internal self-government.   Ber·mu·danadj. & n.Ber·mu·di·anadj. & n.  named after a Spanish sailor, Juan Bermúdez, who sighted the islands early in the 16th cent.

It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold in my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence. I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left me-to suffer.

Along with the figure of Liberty and the tricolored flag, the third revolutionary symbol to return with the Revolution of 1830 was the “Marseillaise,” the forty-year-old song that had been France’s national anthem before the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815. “And the music that was there then,” recalled the composer Hector Berlioz in his memoirs about the atmosphere in Paris in the aftermath of the July Days, “the songs, the harsh voices resounding through the streets—nobody who did not hear it can have an idea what it was like.” Each night crowds gathered under the windows of the Palais Royal to sing the “Marseillaise,” and Louis Philippe would go out on his balcony and beat time for the citizens’ chorus.

Où est la vérité ? où est l’erreur ? partout et nulle part. Chacun a raison ; ce qui est beau pour l’un ne l’est pas pour l’autre, par cela seul que l’un a été ému et que l’autre est demeuré impassible, que le premier a éprouvé une vive jouissance et le second une grande fatigue. Que faire à cela ?.. rien.... mais c’est horrible ; j’aimerais mieux être fou et croire au beau absolu.

J’ai vu une chienne qui hurlait de plaisir en entendant la tierce majeure tenue en double corde sur le violon, elle a fait des petits sur qui la tierce, ni la quinte, ni la sixte, ni l’octave, ni aucun accord consonant ou dissonant, n’ont jamais produit la moindre impression. Le public, de quelque manière qu’il soit composé, est toujours, à l’égard des grandes conceptions musicales, comme cette chienne et ses chiens. Il a certains nerfs qui vibrent à certaines résonances, mais cette organisation, tout incomplète qu’elle soit, étant inégalement répartie et modifiée à l’infini, il s’ensuit qu’il y a presque folie à compter sur tels moyens de l’art plutôt que sur tels autres, pour agir sur lui ; et que le compositeur n’a rien de mieux à faire que d’obéir aveuglément à son sentiment propre, en se résignant d’avance à toutes les chances du hasard.