There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.

He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

Life is the space between our things.

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.