To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

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

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.