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

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

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

Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.