Pablo Casals Quotes

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..

To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.

The CHILD must know that he is a MIRACLE, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world will not be, another child like him.

To live is not enough; we must take part.

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.

The art of not playing in tempo--one has to learn it. And the art of not playing what is written on the printed paper.

Don’t be vain because you happen to have talent. You are not responsible for that; it was not of your doing. What you do with your talent is what matters.

Music will save the world.

The main thing in life is not to be afraid to be human.

How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!

Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it.

the love of ones country is a slended thing but why should love stop at the border.

Love for one's country is great but why should that love stop at that border?

It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.

I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello.

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.” ~ Pablo Casals

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe a moment that never was before and never will be again

The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.

(regarding the prelude from suite two)... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered.

It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice -- and many voices have to be suggested.

Playing the cello did feel nicely neolithic, or at least a civilized way to process the primitive.

You are a miracle, and there has never been-- nor will there ever be--anyone like you - Pau (Pablo) Casals

The 90-year-old Pablo Casals, the world-famous cellist/composer/conductor, asked why he still practiced eight hours a day, said, “Because I think I’m beginning to make some progress.

Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring. Not now or ever. Retire? The word is alien and the idea inconceivable to me. I don’t believe in retirement for anyone in my type of work, not while the spirit remains. My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. To “retire” means to me to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again. For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner.

On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Do we dare to be ourselves? That is the question that counts.

I see no particular merit in the fact that I was an artist at the age of eleven. I was born with an ability, with music in me, that is all. No special credit was due me. The only credit we can claim is for the use we make of the talent we are given. That is why I urge young musicians: “Don’t be vain because you happen to have talent. You are not responsible for that; it was not of your doing. What you do with your talent is what matters. You must cherish this gift. Do not demean or waste what you have been given. Work — work constantly and nourish it.” Of course the gift to be cherished most of all is that of life itself. One’s work should be a salute to life.

What extraordinary changes and advances I have witnessed in my lifetime, what amazing progress in science, industry, the exploration of space, and yet hunger, racial oppression and tyranny still torment the world. We continue to act like barbarians, like savages we fear our neighbors on this earth, arm against them and they against us. I deplore to have lived at a time when man's law is to kill. The love of one's country is a natural thing but why should love stop at the border; our family is one, each of us has a duty to his brothers, we are all leaves of the same tree, and the tree is humanity...

THE AMAZING THING about playing the cello is its deep resonance, how the tones fill your entire body as if it were a sound box of flesh and bone. Every note is a bold statement.

Scandalous as it may sound, it is even possible that the world's greatest cello music was not in fact written for a cello.

Only John Steinbeck, who as both a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, had the words to properly and beautifully describes helicopter pilots. In 1967 he wrote the following to Alicia Patterson, Newsday’s first editor and publisher after a chopper ride. “I wish I could tell you about these pilots. They make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seeming slow hands of (Pablo) Casals on the cello. They are truly musicians hands and they play their controls like music and they dance them like ballerinas and they make me jealous because I want so much to do it.

This landscape consists of Pablo Casals' cello and four turkey vultures riding the ribbon of warm air rising from the highway. Concrete forms for abstractions my mind can only grope at: the wings and blood, the blue and black and float and soar, the aching beauty.

It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? That is that question that counts.

Ludwig was brought up in a house of music. There were seven grand pianos in his childhood home. The composers Brahms and Mahler were frequent visitors to the musical evenings, and young Pablo Casals played there.