Igor Stravinsky Quotes

I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite — matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. And such matter presents itself to me together with limitations. I must in turn impose mine upon it. So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity. Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

~ Igor Stravinsky

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration, it is the Church's greatest ornament.

~ Igor Stravinsky

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

~ Igor Stravinsky

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Childhood - a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

~ Igor Stravinsky

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

~ Igor Stravinsky

What force is more potent than love?

~ Igor Stravinsky

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

~ Igor Stravinsky

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

~ Igor Stravinsky

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

~ Igor Stravinsky

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

~ Igor Stravinsky

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

~ Igor Stravinsky

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

~ Igor Stravinsky