What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

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

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

It should be one’s sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going.

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.

I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment.