Giuseppe Verdi Quotes

“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Show pity I beg you ...
We have today been struck down by fortune
But tomorrow it may be your own turn to die.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“I adore art ... when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

I have striven for perfection, it has always eluded me, but I surely had an obligation to make one more try.

— Giuseppe Verdi

“To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“It is better to invert reality than to copy it.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Stupid criticism and still more stupid praise.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid”

— Giuseppe Verdi

A man like Verdi must write like Verdi.

— Giuseppe Verdi

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

— Giuseppe Verdi

“It may be a good thing to copy reality; but to invent reality is much, much better.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

The artist must yield himself to his own inspiraton, and if he has a true talent, no one knows and feels better than he what suits him.

— Giuseppe Verdi

“I deny that either singers or conductors can create or work creatively - this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Oh blessed a thousand times the peasant who is born, eats and dies without anybody bothering about his affairs.”

— Giuseppe Verdi

“Oh, you happy sons of the North who have been reared at the bosom of Bach, how I envy you!”

— Giuseppe Verdi