Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.