A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.

It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me.

The day will come when all nations amidst which the Jews are dwelling will have to raise the question of their wholesale expulsion, a question which will be one of life or death, good health or chronic disease, peaceful existence or perpetual social fever.

In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.

My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.

I am not fond of speaking about politics because I don't have in my possession an army of 200,000 soldiers.

The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.