Top 40 Franz Liszt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Truth is a great flirt.”

— Franz Liszt

2. “So let us not worry, and look instead as it has been taught us to do, as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, keeping complete faith in Our Father’s goodness.”

— Franz Liszt

3. “Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day.”

— Franz Liszt

4. “My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.”

— Franz Liszt

5. “I foster a sorrowful conception of affection. Make no sacrifices.”

— Franz Liszt

6. “My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.”

— Franz Liszt

7. “My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.”

— Franz Liszt

8. “Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice.”

— Franz Liszt

9. “The day will come when all nations amidst which the Jews are dwelling will have to raise the question of their wholesale expulsion, a question which will be one of life or death, good health or chronic disease, peaceful existence or perpetual social fever.”

— Franz Liszt

10. “A good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world.”

— Franz Liszt

11. “In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.”

— Franz Liszt

12. “The supreme harmony of the cosmos is selected in the harmony of the spirit.”

— Franz Liszt

13. “Broad paths are open to every endeavour, and a sympathetic recognition is assured to every one who consecrates his art to the divine services of a conviction of a consciousness.”

— Franz Liszt

14. “When you write the story of two happy lovers, let the story be set on the banks of Lake Como.”

— Franz Liszt

15. “You cannot imagine how it spoils one to have been a child prodigy.”

— Franz Liszt

16. “The public is always good.”

— Franz Liszt

17. “Music is the heart of life.” She speaks love; “without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.”

— Franz Liszt

18. “Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless.”

— Franz Liszt

19. “The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.”

— Franz Liszt

20. “I am not fond of speaking about politics because I don’t have in my possession an army of 200,000 soldiers.”

— Franz Liszt

21. “Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.”

— Franz Liszt

22. “In Hungary all native music, in its origin, is divided naturally into melody destined for song or melody for the dance.”

— Franz Liszt

23. “I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.”

— Franz Liszt

24. “It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me.”

— Franz Liszt

25. “As for famous men who were not artists, I am beginning to be tired of them. Those poor little scoundrels who are called great men fill me with nothing but overwhelming horror.”

— Franz Liszt

26. “Inspiration is enough to give expression to the tone in singing, especially when the song is without words.”

— Franz Liszt

27. “It is impossible to imagine a more complete fusion with nature than that of the Gypsy.”

— Franz Liszt

28. “A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.”

— Franz Liszt

29. “Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.”

— Franz Liszt

30. “Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing.”

— Franz Liszt

31. “Sorrowful and great is the artist’s destiny.”

— Franz Liszt

32. “As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.”

— Franz Liszt

33. “Brahms’ Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.”

— Franz Liszt

34. “We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm.”

— Franz Liszt

35. “Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ’s religion illuminates with His divine light.”

— Franz Liszt

36. “Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting-places – like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.”

— Franz Liszt

37. “Oral musical traditions are rooted in assured and scrupulous faith.”

— Franz Liszt

38. “In the oldest chronicles of the times conserved in Hungary, reports will be found of Gypsy music, but never of any other, either Magyar, Slavic or Jewish.”

— Franz Liszt

39. “The music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist.”

— Franz Liszt

40. “I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.”

— Franz Liszt

41. “A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances.”

— Franz Liszt