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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

— Hector Berlioz

Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur est qu'il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves.

Original text (French)

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Source, in full

Letter written in November 1856, published in Pierre Citron (ed.) Correspondance générale (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) vol. 5, p. 390; Paul Davies About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) p. 214.

More quotes by Hector Berlioz

The author of The Prophet not only has the good luck to have talent, he has also the talent to have good luck.

Les soirées de l'orchestre (1852)

Instrumentation is to music precisely what color is to painting.

A travers chants (1862)

You request me to tell you…if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet"?

Mémoires (1870)

This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me. The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash. I recognised the meaning of real grandeur, real beauty, and the real dramatic truth.

Mémoires (1870)

I feel grateful to the happy chance which forced me to compose freely and in silence, and has thus delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought.

Mémoires (1870)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hector Berlioz (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.