The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.