Nadia Boulanger Quotes

Quotes about:

• To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Creativity, Breaking Rules

  99 Copy quote

• I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Jobs, Sex

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  195 Copy quote

• Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Limits, Done

  82 Copy quote

• The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Love, Inspirational, Work

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  69 Copy quote

• False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Notes, Forgiven

  31 Copy quote

• It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Taken, Succeed, Done

  42 Copy quote

• The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Art, Profound

  39 Copy quote

• Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Truth, Effects

  38 Copy quote

• It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Profound, Feelings, Enemy

  46 Copy quote

• Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Life, Time, Writing

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  43 Copy quote

• Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Dies

  Advice to her pupils. Quoted in Alan Kendall The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger (1976).

  38 Copy quote

• Without discipline, there can be no freedom.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Discipline

  37 Copy quote

• Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Children, Mean, Parenting

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  40 Copy quote

• Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Done

  32 Copy quote

• It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Inspirational, Worthy, Gifted

  27 Copy quote

• Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Found, Composer

  23 Copy quote

• There is nothing boring in life except ourselves.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Boredom, Boring

  24 Copy quote

• Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Ideas, Privilege

  22 Copy quote

• Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Art, Emotion, Art Is

  20 Copy quote

• Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Art, Likes, Chains

  10 Copy quote

• [On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Women, Years

  11 Copy quote

• The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Inspiration, Order, Ears

  8 Copy quote

• Without order there can be no inner satisfaction. Without inner satisfaction there can be no freedom. Without freedom there is no joy.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Order, Joy, Satisfaction

  21 Copy quote

• Never forget that your days are blessed. You may know how to profit by them, or you may not, but they are blesses.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Blessed, May, Never Forget

  5 Copy quote

• As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Mistake, Serious

  21 Copy quote

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