I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites --opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity --where energies flow smoothly in one direction --there will be much doing but no music.

Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

'Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean, to be entreated, either to begin or end.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.