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

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.

Tradition is the spreading of fire and not the veneration of ashes.

I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas; I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.

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

All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.