To be happy, you must learn to forget yourself.

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone.

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing

Genius has no brother.

He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.