Ludwig van Beethoven

I shall seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.

I despise a world that doesn't feel that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

I want to seize fate by the throat.

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

Friends applaud, the Comedy is over.

My angel, my all, my very self . . . my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to learn whether or not fate will hear us - I can live only wholly with you or not at all . . . Be calm - love me - today - yesterday - what tearful longings for you - you - you - my life - my all - farewell. Oh continue to love - never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved. Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.

From the glow of enthusiasm I let the melody escape. I pursue it. Breathless I catch up with it. It flies again, I seize it. I embrace it with delight. I multiply it then by modulations, and at last I triumph in the first theme. There is the whole symphony.

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.

Music - The one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.