Top 80 Igor Stravinsky Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.”

— Igor Stravinsky

2. “Hurry? I have no time to hurry.”

— Igor Stravinsky

3. “Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.”

— Igor Stravinsky

4. “I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”

— Igor Stravinsky

5. “To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.”

— Igor Stravinsky

6. “Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.”

— Igor Stravinsky

7. “Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.”

— Igor Stravinsky

8. “Composers combine notes, that’s all.”

— Igor Stravinsky

9. “Revolution means turning the wheel.”

— Igor Stravinsky

10. “Vivaldi didn’t write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.”

— Igor Stravinsky

11. “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

— Igor Stravinsky

12. “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

— Igor Stravinsky

13. “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”

— Igor Stravinsky

14. “Composition is selective improvisation.”

— Igor Stravinsky

15. “My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.”

— Igor Stravinsky

16. “My music is best understood by children and animals.”

— Igor Stravinsky

17. “Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?”

— Igor Stravinsky

18. “I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!”

— Igor Stravinsky

19. “The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.”

— Igor Stravinsky

20. “Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.”

— Igor Stravinsky

21. “The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.”

— Igor Stravinsky

22. “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”

— Igor Stravinsky

23. “What force is more potent than love?”

— Igor Stravinsky

24. “The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church’s greatest ornament.”

— Igor Stravinsky

25. “Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.”

— Igor Stravinsky

26. “I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.”

— Igor Stravinsky

27. “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.”

— Igor Stravinsky

28. “Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.”

— Igor Stravinsky

29. “All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.”

— Igor Stravinsky

30. “Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.”

— Igor Stravinsky

31. “It’s one of nature’s way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.”

— Igor Stravinsky

32. “I live neither in the past nor in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.”

— Igor Stravinsky

33. “Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.”

— Igor Stravinsky

34. “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.”

— Igor Stravinsky

35. “In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?”

— Igor Stravinsky

36. “The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.”

— Igor Stravinsky

37. “What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators...”

— Igor Stravinsky

38. “One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one’s conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren’t always right.”

— Igor Stravinsky

39. “Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.”

— Igor Stravinsky

40. “A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.”

— Igor Stravinsky

41. “The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.”

— Igor Stravinsky

42. “The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.”

— Igor Stravinsky

43. “What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.”

— Igor Stravinsky

44. “I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”

— Igor Stravinsky

45. “To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.”

— Igor Stravinsky

46. “My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.”

— Igor Stravinsky

47. “I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.”

— Igor Stravinsky

48. “Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?”

— Igor Stravinsky

49. “Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.”

— Igor Stravinsky

50. “Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.”

— Igor Stravinsky