If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.
Gustav Mahler

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
Gustav Mahler

In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage.
Gustav Mahler

It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces.
Gustav Mahler

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.
Gustav Mahler

It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.
Gustav Mahler

It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.
Gustav Mahler

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.
Gustav Mahler

Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way.
Gustav Mahler

Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.
Gustav Mahler

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.
Gustav Mahler

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.
Gustav Mahler

The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content.
Gustav Mahler

The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.
Gustav Mahler

The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
Gustav Mahler

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler

The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.
Gustav Mahler

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.
Gustav Mahler

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
Gustav Mahler

What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.
Gustav Mahler