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.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.