FREDERIC CHOPIN

Oh, how hard it must be to die anywhere but in one's birthplace.

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!

The crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me. I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb.

Vienna is a handsome, lively city, and pleases me exceedingly.

Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist!

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

As long as I have health and strength, I will gladly work all my days.

I shall create a new world for myself.

Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel!

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me.

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 have met a great celebrity, Madame Dudevant, known as George Sand... Her appearance is not to my liking. Indeed there is something about her which positively repels me... What an unattractive person La Sand is... Is she really a woman? I'm inclined to doubt it.

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

England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere.

I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.

Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.

Among the numerous pleasures of Vienna the hotel evenings are famous. During supper Strauss or Lanner play waltzes...After every waltz they get huge applause; and if they play a Quodlibet, or jumble of opera, song and dance, the hearers are so overjoyed that they don't know what to do with themselves. It shows the corrupt taste of the Viennese public.

Here, whatever is not boring is not English.

They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me.

I don't know how it is, but the Germans are amazed at me and I am amazed at them for finding anything to be amazed about.

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

All the same it is being said everywhere that I played too softly, or rather, too delicately for people used to the piano-pounding of the artists here.