Luciano Pavarotti Quotes

I am a very simple person. In spite of all that has happened to me, I have tried to remain the simple person I started out.

If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.

Every day I remind myself of all that I have been given. … With singing, you never know when you are going to lose the voice, and that makes you appreciate the time that you have when you are still singing well. I am always thanking God for another season, another month, another performance.

The good historian, then, must be thus described: he must be fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig a fig, and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any, from favour or from enmity, not influenced by pity, by shame, or by remorse; a just judge, so far benevolent to all as never to give more than is due to any in his work; a stranger to all, of no country, bound only by his own laws, acknowledging no sovereign, never considering what this or that man may say of him, but relating faithfully everything as it happened.

I say, therefore, that he who would write history well must be possessed of these two principal qualifications, a fine understanding and a good style: one is the gift of nature, and cannot be taught; the other may be acquired by frequent exercise, perpetual labour and an emulation of the ancients.

If the brave should fly, he who pursues must be braver.

For history, I say again, has this and this only for its own: if a man will start upon it, he must sacrifice to no God but Truth; he must neglect all else; his sole rule and unerring guide is this – to think not of those who are listening to him now, but of the yet unborn who shall seek his converse.

People think I'm disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.

These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.

I think an important quality that I have is that if you turn on the radio and hear somebody sing, you know it's me. You don't confuse my voice with another voice.

History, when she adds pleasure to utility, may attract more admirers; though as long as she is possessed of that greatest of perfections, truth, she need not be anxious concerning beauty.

One of the very best things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

The effort only shifted me from the frying-pan into the fire.