IGNACY JAN PADEREWSKI

I established a certain standard of behavior, that, during my playing, there must be no talking.

You are a dear soul who plays polo, and I am a poor Pole who plays solo.

Piano playing is more difficult than statesmanship. It is harder to awake emotions in ivory keys than it is in human beings.

The great familiar musical works are always greeted by the audiences as ever welcome and beloved friends.

I do not believe, as do so many musicians, that genius should be left to fight its way to the light. Genius is too rare, too precious, to be permitted to waste the best years of life--the years of youth and lofty dreams--in a heart-breaking struggle for bread. To starve the soul with the body is to do worse than murder. Think, too, of what the public loses!

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

The mere fact of knowing that a great audience waits on your labor is enough to shake all your nerves to pieces.

Musical expression is never primarily national, but is personal and individual rather. It is so deep, so profound, that it goes beyond and below nationality and gives voice to the most private feeling. In music there is never exact heredity. Each man is an individual.

Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.

The culture of any country is gauged first by its progress in art.

Times change, people change, thought and feeling take new shapes, put on fresh garments, sons bow their heads unwillingly to that which enraptured their fathers.

Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

I loved your country [America] before I knew it.

Music expresses first of all sadness rather than joy.

I cannot imagine a genuinely happy home without music in it.

Music is the only art that actually lives.

Every new generation in its hour of dawn, filled with the dreams of youth, its thirsts, intoxications and enthusiasms, thinks itself called upon to impel humanity towards heights unmeasured, believes itself an appointed pathfinder, a thinker of thoughts, a doer of deeds greater than any of those which came before. Every new generation desires beauty, but a beauty all its own.

Before I was a genius I was a drudge.

The genius is the man who has genuine and deep human relations with others, who does not cut himself off in the search for originality, but who realizes the value of artistic tradition.

Art is the expression of the immortal part of man.

When one is an artist, what else can he be?

Art is great only when it bears the stamp of the individual.

I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.