Time is the best of critics; and patience the best of teachers.

I don't know where there can be so many pianists as in Paris, so many asses and so many virtuosi.

A strange adventure befell me while I was playing my Sonata in B flat minor before some English friends. I had played the Allegro and the Scherzo more or less correctly. I was about to attack the March when suddenly I saw arising from the body of my piano those cursed creatures which had appeared to me one lugubrious night at the Chartreuse. I had to leave for one instant to pull myself together after which I continued without saying anything.

England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere.

The earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.

Liszt commenting on the music of Frédéric Chopin: He confided . . . those inexpressible sorrows to which the pious give vent in their communication with their Maker. What they never say except upon their knees, he said in his palpitating compositions.

I tell my piano the things I used to tell you