"This is what I think art is and what I demand of it: that it pull everyone in, that it show one person another's most intimate thoughts and feelings, that it throw open the window of the soul."
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847). Pianist, violinist, conductor, composer, painter, writer, ...

"The aesthetic principle is the same in every art, only the material differs. "
Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Composer and author

"Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity"
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881). Composer

"A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood."
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Composer

"Art is the most beautiful of all lies."
Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Composer

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes aah, that is where the art resides."
Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). Pianist

"Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself."
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Composer

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony."
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). Composer

"The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world."
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). Composer and Conductor

"The purpose of art is the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."
Glen Gould (1932-1982). Pianist extraordinaire

"Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity."
Daniel Barenboim (1942- ). Pianist and conductor

"True art is imperishable and the true artist finds profound delight in grand productions of genius."

"Nature knows no quiescence; and true art walks with her hand in hand; her sister- from whom heaven forefend us!- is called artificiality".

Beethoven (1770- 1827). Composer

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
Frederic Chopin

"Any great work of art…revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."
Leonard Bernstein

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."
Robert Schumann

"I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous."
Pyotr Tchaikovsky, quoted in Schafer, British Composers in Interview (1963)

interesting to read the quotations - anyone got their own thoughts on this one too?

Not Tracy Emin, anyway...... (although she's not a musician.......)