“I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.

There is no such thing as happy music. My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.

Those who are born of grief give greatest delight to the outside world.

Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.

For long years I felt torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love. . . . Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus were love and pain divided in me.

My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best.

No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.

When all hopes of recognition or honor have faded into distant memory, when purity of heart meets sorrow of mind, when all the world seems to walk in blindness and yet a man works without wearying for that which he loves… only in this moment is passion truly understood.

You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.”

Franz Schubert’s quotes

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~Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of piano and chamber music.

Excellence Reporter 2020