Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

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

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

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.

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

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.