Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.