Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .

Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.

Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.