Quotes by Pyotr Tchaikovsky

• I am what God created me to be and what my upbringing, circumstances, and characteristics of the age and country in which I live and act have made me.

• Opera is hardly the richest musical form after all. But I feel that I am still more inclined toward the symphonic genre.

• How can you describe what you’re feeling when you create an instrumental work without a definite plot? It is a lyrical process, a musical confession of the soul, pouring itself out in sounds, just as a lyric poet expresses himself in verse.

• The beauty in music is not the piling up of effects and harmonic curiosities, but simplicity and naturalness.

• Where words are powerless, there is a more eloquent language, music, in its full force.

• Remember, even a man gifted with the stamp of genius will not produce anything not only great, but average, unless he works like hell.

• How happy they are, that in them all feelings are direct and simple. Blame yourself and don’t say that everything in the world is sad. There are simple but powerful joys. Have fun with other people’s fun. It is possible to live after all.

• I am what God created me to be, and what my upbringing, circumstances, and characteristics of the age and country in which I live and act have made me.

• Life has beauty only when it consists of the alternation of joys and sorrows, of the struggle between good and evil, of light and shadow, in a word – of diversity in unity.

• A whole swarm of memories appeared. And it’s sad that so many have been, and it’s nice to remember my youth. And pity for the past, and no desire to start life all over again. Life is tiring. It’s nice to rest and look around. I remember a lot of things. There were moments of joy, when young blood was boiling and life was satisfying. There were hard moments, irreplaceable losses. All of this is somewhere far away. And it is sad and somehow sweet to sink into the past.