I lived in Italy for three years and wanted no part of the country's disreputable way of life.

I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice . . . . Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters; soon it will fall, in the course of centuries--that is, tomorrow. . . . In good time we shall only have to deal with reason.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Love is rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and it's all in vain to call it if it chooses to refuse.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche commenting on the music of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.

Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!