If I don't practise for one day, I know it; if I don't practise for two days, the critics knows it; if I don't practise for three days, the audience knows it.

Beginnings play their prized part in every finished human accomplishment, for beginnings mean the birth of added progress.

I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

Fatherland before everything, art afterward.

Music is the only art that actually lives.

When one is an artist, what else can he be?