My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.