I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier.
If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.
The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.
You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.
A true personality . . . is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable.