Bela Bartok famous quotes

05-24-2025

Competitions are for horses, not artists.
-- Bela Bartok

#Inspiring #Horse #Artist
His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.
-- Bela Bartok

#Music #Echoes #Years
Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.
-- Bela Bartok

#Mean #Order #Ideas
In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.
-- Bela Bartok

#Art #Development #Matter
I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.
-- Bela Bartok

#Music
Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.
-- Bela Bartok

#Self #Creative #Tone
It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.
-- Bela Bartok

#Believe #May #Composer
With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.
-- Bela Bartok

#Maturity #Simple #Wish

What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.
If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.
My family and I reside on a non-working farm, although we have a couple of horses and the usual stuff like pigs, cows, and chickens. We really don't have an honest-to-goodness farm, more of a hobby farm.
A camel is a horse designed by committee.
The more an artist works the more there is to do.
The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren't.
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

Bela Bartok famous quotes

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