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It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money.

— Jean Sibelius

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Notes from Wikiquote

Usually quoted as "Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."

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More quotes by Jean Sibelius

Whereas most other modern composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, I offer the public cold spring water.

The framework of a symphony must be so strong that it forces you to follow it, regardless of the environment and circumstances.

If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.

Never pay any attention to what critics say…Remember, a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic!

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Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

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Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

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