Best 8 quotes of Bela Bartok on MyQuotes

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist.

It is odd that the Bible says, ‘God created man,’ whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, ‘The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,’ whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory.