It is so rare...to find a complete person, with a soul, a heart and an imagination; so rare for characters as ardent and restless as ours to meet and to be matched together, that I hardly know how to tell you what happiness it gives me to know you.

Heine commenting on the music of Louis Hector Berlioz: He is an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle. . . . The music causes me to dream of fabulous empires, filled with fabulous sins.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Bach is Bach just as God is God.

At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.