The love of power is the demon of mankind.

It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.

Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!

It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won’t chime.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.