Life without music is only error, exhaustion, exile... Indeed, there is nothing that concerns me more than the fate of music.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.

Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip

For as long as they praise you, never forget that it is not yet your own path that you walk, but another person's.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

He who knows not how to plant his will in things at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them (A principle of faith.)