No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

No one understands another's grief, no one understands another's joy... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best.

I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.

Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.

Approval or blame will follow in the world to come.

One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art?

It sometimes seems to me as if I do not belong to this world at all. I deplore music that engenders in people not love but madness: which rouses them to scornful laughter instead of lifting their thoughts to God.