I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.

Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way.

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation.

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.