Franz Schubert - Selected Diary entries

Franz Schubert (drawing by Leopold Kupelweiser, 1821)

March 25, 1824:


Sorrow sharpens the understanding and strengthens the character, whereas happiness seldom troubles about the former, and only makes for weakness or frivolity in the latter.


With all my heart I hate that narrow-mindedness which makes so many wretched people believe that what they think and do is best, and that everything else is worthless. One thing of beauty, it is true, should inspire a man throughout his life, yet the gleam of this single inspiration should illuminate everything else.


March 27, 1824:


No one to feel the other's grief, no one to understand the other's joy! People imagine that they can reach one another but in reality they only pass one another by. Oh misery for him who realizes this!


All that I have created is born of my undertanding of music and my own sorrow: that which is engendered by grief alone seems to please the world least of all.


March 28, 1824:


Man comes into the world armed with faith, which is far superior to knowledge and understanding: for in order to understand a thing, one must first of all believe in it. Faith is the high fundament in which the weaker intellect erects the first pillars of conviction.


Reason is nothing more than analysed belief.


March 29, 1824:


O imagination! Man's greatest treasure, inexhaustible source at which both Art and Learning come to drink! O remain with us, though recognized and venerated only by the few, so that we may be safeguarded from so-called enlightenment, that hideous skeleton without flesh or blood.


undated entry, 1824:


2 o'clock a.m.


Enviable Nero! You were strong enough to destroy a corrupt people with the sound of stringed instruments and with song!

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Source:  Franz Schubert's Letters and Other Writings
Forward by Ernest Newman; Ed. Otto E. Deutsch;
Trans. Venetia Savile; Knopf, 1928