A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

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

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.