Frédéric Chopin Quotes

Time is still the best critic, and patience the best teacher.

It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness.

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

One can’t have everything in this world; be content with the greatest of joys: health.

Translation 1: I am going to wash now; don't kiss me, I'm not washed yet. You? If I were smeared with the oils of Byzantium, you would not kiss me unless I forced you to it by magnetism. There's some kind of power in nature. Today you will dream of kissing me! I have got to pay you out for the horrible dream you gave me last night.

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.

Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot exploit him, and three years is too much. But he has convinced me that I can play admirably when I am in the mood, and badly when I am not; a thing which never happens to him. After close examination he told me that I have no school; that I am on an excellent road, but can slip off the track. That after his death, or when he finally stops playing, there will be no representative of the great piano-forte school. That even if I wish it, I cannot build up a new school without knowing the old one; in a word : that I am not a perfected machine, and that this hampers the flow of my thoughts. That I have a mark in composition; that it would be a pity not to become what I have the promise of being...

To die is man’s finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born.

I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.

You know how easily things grow out of nothing, when they pass through a mouth that smears them all over and makes something else out of them —

So, having dried my tear-swollen eyelids, I take up my pen to inquire of you, are you alive or did you die? If you are dead, please let me know, and I will tell the cook, for ever since she heard about it she has been saying her prayers.

Chaque difficulté sera un fantôme qui perturbera votre repos plus tard.

Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.

Fingers of steel. Wrist of silk.