Most of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense